The current OpenSolaris user registration screens collect timezone and location information, and I'm considering what we should do with these in the new auth webapp, as in their current form both have problems.
Timezone -------- Currently this is built from a hard-coded timezone list http://cvs.opensolaris.org/source/xref/website/portal/trunk/src/java/org/opensolaris/base/util/TimeZone.java and then looking up information in the J2SE timezone class (also called TimeZone) - see http://cvs.opensolaris.org/source/xref/website/portal/trunk/src/java/org/opensolaris/tonic/action/user/ListInfoAction.java#40. I have no idea of the sanity of the resulting list, and I can see at least one problem - the initialisation code is only run once, and it uses the current date/time in its calculations of the GMT offset, so if the appserver runs over a DST change, the offsets will change but the list won't. Of course, the appserver has to be restarted every night anyway for other reasons, so I guess we just got lucky ;-) The aggregation of timezones by GMT offset in the current version also means that we get less info that we otherwise might, for example Amsterdam, Berlin, Bern, Rome, Stockholm and Vienna are all lumped together. My suggestion is that we just use the standard list as provided by the Java TimeZone.getAvailableIds() method http://java.sun.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/util/TimeZone.html#getAvailableIDs() preprocessing the list to discard the Etc/ entries, which are all just GMT offsets, and the SystemV timezones, which I didn't even realise existed. Location -------- This is a freeform text field, and has a whole range of information in it, from a full postal address, just a postal code, a geographic area, a country, /dev/null (hilarious) and nothing at all. My suggestion is that we replace this with an explicit country list. Google likes http://schmidt.devlib.org/data/countries.txt, but I'm open to other suggestions for a data source. Comments please. -- Alan Burlison -- _______________________________________________ website-discuss mailing list [email protected]
