Re: date/time issue - daylight saving

[Eric Cleereman (IT)]

**

Hi ahaha hehehe,

 

We've run into the similar issues, except that we gain an hour, rather than losing one.  This comes from the timestamps being stored in Remedy in Epoch time.  The epoch is relative to Midnight of 1/1/1970 GMT.

 

I don't know what time zone you are in, but by what you are describing, I'd guess you are located in the southern hemisphere.  I'll describe what I've seen from my time zones, which are Eastern Standard Time (GMT -5:00) and Eastern Daylight Time (GMT -4:00).

 

In my case, when a date is recorded in the system at midnight of April 1st, our time zone was EST.  This would have been stored in the database as an integer containing the number of seconds between Midnight of 1/1/1970 GMT and 5:00 AM of April 1st GMT.

 

Since that point, my time zone zone has switched to EDT.  So looking at the same timestamp now, I would now see that it was 1:00 AM of April 1st, which still be 5:00 AM of April 1st GMT.  The difference comes from the time zone I am in when I observe Daylight Savings being only 4 hours behind GMT instead of 5 hours behind.

 

Another way of looking at it is:  If you described the current time as Midnight, someone from a time zone 1 hour behind you would describe the same moment of time as 11:00 PM the preceding date, while someone an hour ahead of your time zone would describe it as 1:00 AM on the same date as you.  All three of you would be correct in your descriptions.

 

Remedy is presenting the time accurately, given your time zone.  If what you are looking to do is have Remedy present the time in the time zone and time it was recorded in, you may do so by recording the timestamp to a character field at that point.  Note that while this may seem more intuitive, you will actually lose some precision by doing this, so you may also consider just mirroring it to the character field, rather than eliminating the date time field altogether.

 

Eric Cleereman

-----Original Message-----
From: Action Request System discussion list(ARSList) [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]On Behalf Of ahaha hehehe
Sent: Monday, August 14, 2006 1:09 AM
To: arslist@ARSLIST.ORG
Subject: date/time issue - daylight saving

**

Hi Guys,

 

We've got some issues where "occasionally" the date decides to change

itself on certain records.

I'm still trying to trap the exact cause, but it's something like this:

We have a rent record which records your rent due with a from date and

to date (when this rate's applicable)

Every now and again, we get this happening:

Rent From was 1/4/05.

Record is updated (NOT the date however)

Now date is 31/3/05 (looking closer, it's stored as 31/3/05 11:00pm)

 

We got lots of this when Daylight saving is in effect.

 

Please advise.

 

Thanks!

 

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