Comments on: Confusing TimeZone Offset Functionality in Flex

By: Jason

Jason — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 20:09:04 +0000

hey jd – flex gets its information from the system clock however as far as I can tell there’s no way to get the timezone code. The best you can do is get the UTC offset. If you have the UTC offset you can usually deduce the timezone if you know what country the user is in.

By: JD

JD — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 19:08:45 +0000

Can Flex even deduce the “local” timezone in terms of EDT,CDT,PDT … and so forth.

By: Shane

Shane — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 00:51:13 +0000

Voted/annoyed.

By: Jason

Jason — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 23:27:43 +0000

Hey John, I hear you. Please vote for Adobe to do away with the final declaration on the Date class (linked above).

If I were designing my app from scratch again, I would write some sort of wrapper object that accepts Dates and then outputs them in the correct timezone.

I might even just store dates as string data and then intercept them anytime they get displayed or persisted, but I hate the thought of not using the correct data type.

Thanks for stopping by

By: John Gag

John Gag — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 23:09:45 +0000

I just dont understand why this cant be done right out of the box. I am getting really annoyed with this date BS!!!

By: Flex: All your dates are belong to us | VerySimple

Flex: All your dates are belong to us | VerySimple — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 19:38:05 +0000

[...] feel like I’m constantly ranting about Flex’s implementation of Dates. This week I just discovered a new [...]

By: Jason

Jason — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 07:57:25 +0000

Hey Dexterous, thanks for the post. Well, I’ve already solved all of these issues for my own needs – unfortunately I’ve ran into just about every problem along the way due to the nature of my company’s main product. We have people in timezones all over the world who are working on schedules for touring productions. The users are across the globe and the events they are planning are constantly moving across timezones. So our sensitivity to timezone offsets is probably way more intense than the average app – I definitely recognize that.

I know Flex is trying to help by dealing with the timezone offset. Unfortunately if you don’t want that behavior then you’re stuck using either Date hacks or UI hacks. And they poured salt in the wound by making Date final. It’s seems to me they are only designing the API for a certain use case, which unfortunately doesn’t fit my needs. That’s just my humble-but-correct opinion!

Thanks for stopping by, j

By: Dexterous

Dexterous — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 06:22:20 +0000

Hi,

Though I agree with you that it is a bit confusing about the Date and timeZoneOffset, I do not agree with your opinion completely. I mean there is no point in making the timeZoneOffset as a read/write property. I have worked in many projects which were global and which needed to show dates in local timezone of the user wherein the input from the DB was a UTC date. Thoughit takes a little extra effort, it is not so much difficult to convert the date from UTC to any timezone and display it accordingly. (You can directly add or remove milliseconds to the date object based on that of the offset).
I also felt earlier that the formatter could a take an additional parameter of how much offset we want to add to a date before displaying – but if you know that you have to do this then the DateFormatter class is not final, you can extend it and can have your addition param for the offset.