Hello Florijan;

I notice there is some mentioning of java.util.Date being converted to and from NSTimestamp. I am not sure why this is mentioned as a problem.

Thinking back a few years, I seem to remember there was some troubles with the argument date object mysteriously transporting timezones to the constructed date object or something like this -- sorry no details spring to mind, but I found that if I was always careful to use the millisecond constructors then it would be OK because, being a primative, a 'long' type cannot carry a timezone. "Here be dragons" (and hence no goats).

What we need is a date the user provides, set in GMT, at 11:30. That is because timezones go from GMT-1100 to GMT+1200, so the only times that produce textually the same date (viewed in whichever timezone) are those in between of 11:00 GMT and 12:00 GMT, endpoints excluded.


It would be tricky to represent a date across multiple timezones when, in reality, you are working only with a millisecond offset from a fixed reference date. I have used your +11:00 method when the logical end-user timezone is known and this works well, but I can't see that this would work at all when the date needs to be applicable across timezones. Here are some ideas;

1) store the components of the date as atomic attributes on the entity; year, month, day

2) store the date as an ISO-formatted string '1976-09-28'

3) store the date as a timestamp relative to GMT (at ~midday) and each time you need it for a specific timezone then decompose the timestamp in GMT to date components and then re-assemble in the target timezone as date components.

Let us all know how you get on.

cheers.

___
Andrew Lindesay
www.lindesay.co.nz

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