On Thu, Jan 29, 2009 at 3:11 PM, stephen O'D <[email protected]>wrote:
> > I have an app that stores appointments. > > Appointments can recur daily, weekly etc or just be one off. > > The application needs to notify users 15 minutes before each > appointment. > > Now, I know that I can use various Rails 2.1 features to help with > TimeZones such as Time.zones, but what I am not sure about is daylight > savings and these recurring reminders and people changing their > timezones. > > Lets say a user creates a daily reminder for 1pm in their timezone, > say UTC -5 - ActiveRecord stores it at 6pm UTC. > > Later in the year, due to daylight savings, their timezone becomes UTC > -4, and all of a sudden, their appointment shifts by 1 hour. > > Also, if a user flies off on business, and their timezone becomes UTC > +5, all the appointments will be totally at the wrong time. > > I am wondering what the best practice for this sort of scenario is? > Should I always store local times in my database (ie if a user wants > an appointment at 1pm, just store 1pm) and then the logic that sends > reminders needs to get a time and adjust it to UTC to figure out when > to send the reminder? That allows me to change reminders, and handle > daylight savings correctly, at the expense of complex reminder logic. > > I struggle to think of a way of handling daylight saving around daily > appointments etc if I store appointments normalised to UTC in my > database? > > Opinions, comments and best practices all appreciated! > > Thanks, > > Stephen. > > > I haven't worked with time zones yet but a quick search returned this http://mad.ly/2008/04/09/rails-21-time-zone-support-an-overview/ which has some mentions of daylight savings. -- Andrew Timberlake http://ramblingsonrails.com http://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewtimberlake "I have never let my schooling interfere with my education" - Mark Twain --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby on Rails: Talk" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-talk?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
