The UBIK® clients now provide basic time zone support.
Display of DateTime values
Most DateTime values are displayed in local times of the running devices. This includes property values, validation timestamps, live value timestamps, etc.
 | When the time zone setting of the device changes, the displayed texts will change accordingly. A restart of the app is needed, though. |
The exceptions are the following more customization oriented values which are displayed as they are delivered from the server.
Limitations
Day light saving
Day light saving might cause some DateTime values to be inaccurate. Consider when summer time ends on 29th of March 2020. The clock will fast forward from 2:00 to 3:00, therefore, making e.g. 2:30 a point in time that simply doesn't exist. Similar situations also occur when the summer time begins. For simplicity reason, UBIK® does not check such values and force the users to further clarify. As a result, the recorded DateTime value might not always be what the users mean when the value is around such switching hours.
Free text search
The search is done against the display texts of the values stored in the database. And DateTime values are stored under a specific time zone which is determined when the saving occurs. This means when the same database is used in a different time zone, such searches using DateTime inputs will mostly like fail. There are a few solutions to this problem.
- Delete the local data and fetch the data again using the correct time zone;
- If a branch download must be prepared in advance, do it using the time zone in which users of the search feature will be operating;
- Perform searches with the time zone difference in mind, add/subtract the hours of difference to the search inputs.