Dirk, Yes I have read your response and thank you for it. Your suggestions seem well thought out and quite effective. Unfortunately, they would cause me and my team to much extra work at this point in our project, to be particularly helpful.
In my current network the servers reside in Seattle (GMT-8 or -7 in summers) but the app is used in at least 5 time zones. The App however simply does not care about time zone. For the most part it does not care about time, only date. Having to convert the dates to/from UTC time would mean we have to configure each user for their home time zone and then look that data up each time we deal with a date value. This also becomes a problem since many users use this system on laptops and travel all around North America. We also deal with some very large datasets, it not uncommon for a user to load 5,000 records in a single request each containing 2 date fields. We would have to retrieve the records from the database, loop through then converting each field by the difference between UTC and that user's current time zone, and then send them to the client. This would ensure that they get to the user in their local time. Yet a bigger issue is that we are concurrently developing 2 more UI options; a .NET Smart Client and a pure ASP.NET/HTML client for down-level users. It has always been our intent that these other UI's would use the same mid-tier and web services as the Flex UI. We have decided that we do not want to write several hundred extra lines of code and create a separate set of web services to deal with the bad behavior of one UI technology. The solution I am currently adopting is two-fold: 1) I've build an HTTP Module that recognizes requests from Flex and re-writes the WSDL on-the-fly replacing 'dateTime' elements with 'string' elements. This causes flex to leave the date as a string in format "yyyy-MM-ddThh:mm:ss" and works much better than a Date object in AS3. It's also comparable with standard operators and sortable. I've also built my own DateUtils class for performing additional functions and conversion to/from AS3 Dates, and a DateInput component that works like a hybrid TextInput / DateField control and supports 2-way binding directly to a date string in the format .NET sends. In short, we decided not to use any date object in Flex. 2) Continue to respectfully petition the Flex development team to fix the behavior of Dates and Web Services in Flex 2.0 to be more compatible with services that are not time zone aware, by making these behaviors user definable. I'm also hoping to convince them to change the inner working of the Date object to be comparable and sortable using standard operators, like Strings and Numbers are. -- Thanks to everyone who has offered their help and comments to my question. Based on much of your feedback I now have a solution that although not perfect, is working well. If any other .NET users would like copies of the HTTP module and/or custom Flex components we've developed for this solution, we will be documenting them and releasing them open source after our project is completed and released. Sincerely, - Kelly Birr VP / Lead Developer Agents Ally, Inc --- In [email protected], "Dirk Eismann" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Kelly, > > have you read my suggestions? We also had Date conversion issues but where able to resolve them (see my reply from Friday) > > Dirk. > ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Yahoo! Groups gets a make over. See the new email design. http://us.click.yahoo.com/XISQkA/lOaOAA/yQLSAA/nhFolB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> -- Flexcoders Mailing List FAQ: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/flexcoders/files/flexcodersFAQ.txt Search Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/flexcoders%40yahoogroups.com Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/flexcoders/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
