-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 All,
We're getting to the point in our project where allowing users to identify their own time zone so we can display adjusted timestamps is something we can no longer do without. I'm trying to figure out how to display a list of time zones in a drop-down list for users to pick. Java's TimeZone class provides a static method, getAvailableIDs, that returns the huge list of time zones that the current JVM knows about. Then, I can use this list to fetch each TimeZone object by id and shove them into a list to display on the screen. So far, so good. To display, I have two options: use the "ID" which is usually of the form "America/New_York" or use the "display name" which varies wildly from zone to zone. Here's an example of a few time zones that get returned from my JVM (Oracle Java 1.6.0_26-b03 on a Debian Squeeze system): ID Display Name (English) ACT Central Standard Time (Northern Territory) AET Eastern Standard Time (New South Wales) AGT Argentine Time ART Eastern European Time AST Alaska Standard Time Africa/Abidjan Greenwich Mean Time Africa/Accra Ghana Mean Time ... America/Chicago Central Standard Time ... CST Central Standard Time ... Already, I can see a few problems: 1. Time zones are repeated with different IDs. That might not be such a big deal, since some people might like to look for "CST" and others might be looking for "America/Chicago". But including both requires the list to be very long. 2. If I go with "display name" instead of "id", then I have to decide which id to use when there are many choices. For instance, "Greenwich Mean Time" gets used a lot, but has lots of ids. If I arbitrarily choose "Africa/Abidjan" as the id to use for that label, then everyone who expected GMT might suddenly find their timestamps off if the Abidjanese people decide in the future to abandon GMT. 3. You can't see it, but the "ids" are not localized. The "display name" is available for many languages directly from the JVM but not the id. That means that the nice labels like "America/Chicago" will always have those labels, regardless of the user's display language. Not ideal. 4. We (the US) are currently not in DST, so "CST" is displayed and not "CDT". I checked, and it looks like there is no "CDT" time zone so during DST it will still say "CST" which probably nobody but me will notice. I feel like I've got a Catch-22, here: despite the wealth of information provided by the JVM, I think I might still have to just have a giant list of supported time zones and hand-localize them, especially if I want to have "America/New York"-style labels. Does anyone have any suggestions? Thanks, - -chris -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG/MacGPG2 v2.0.17 (Darwin) Comment: GPGTools - http://gpgtools.org Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iEYEARECAAYFAk7yDM8ACgkQ9CaO5/Lv0PBwdwCfbI1xwryuMOWpP+pf+CAGtmTZ vIQAn2IyFrAz17a45C9Yr0L+jTzCenn7 =I5AZ -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscr...@tomcat.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: users-h...@tomcat.apache.org
