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Re: Recording and looking up dates, when day-wide precision is required
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Re: Recording and looking up dates, when day-wide precision is required


  • Subject: Re: Recording and looking up dates, when day-wide precision is required
  • From: Florijan Stamenkovic <email@hidden>
  • Date: Tue, 30 Dec 2008 11:19:06 -0400


On Dec 30, 2008, at 06:03, Lachlan Deck wrote:

Hi there,

On 30/12/2008, at 7:47 PM, Andrew Lindesay wrote:

I _think_ (correct me if I'm wrong) Florijan would like to store a logical date rather than a timestamp. For example, he would like to store the date 2008-09-28. The requirement being that the same date is applicable to all timezones because it is composited from year/month/day and is thus independent of timezones.

An example where this might be useful is to store birthdays.

Right - I think it was Florijan's more elaborate description that confused me :-) I thought he was saying he wanted the date to be presented according to the user's local timezone whilst at the same time he was talking about this need. So I wasn't clear on his aims.

Plus, perhaps you were thinking of a web-app scenario, and that's not what I am doing. I am working on a JC app, where dates are transferred to and from the client machine in raw form. So, all the parsing and formatting happens on the client machine, which could be anywhere.


For example, a birthday is 1980-08-08. If I should decide to live in Munich for a while (I presently live in Auckland) then the same birthday applies, but if I stored it as a timestamp then it would have shifted to another day while I live in Munich. Hence the difficulty storing these things as timestamps.

Depends when you want your present ;-)

So if you're storing dates in the database (as opposed to timestamps) you'll have to normalise them prior to storage. For display you'll need a custom formatter.

As I stated before, a point in time defined with the time of 11:30 GMT, whichever date, formats into the same date (textually) in virtually all timezones. However, I still have some confusion about this. If I look at a map of the world, virtually all places on the planet are in the -11 +12 offset range:


http://www.yeswatch.com/timekeeper/images/manual/time-zone-map-large.jpg

However, Java provides different results. For example, the "New Zealand Standard Time" is at +13. Something I do not understand at all (since geographically it is partly in +11, partly in +12). So, apparently this method does not cover 100% of the globe. Bummer. I guess that a custom formatter would be necessary to cover also those time zones (-12, +13, +14). Or I can just ignore the New Zealanders :P

F

btw, sorry for the confusion, I should have indicated that this is a JC scenario, and perhaps you could have seen what I was trying to say.
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  • Follow-Ups:
    • Re: Recording and looking up dates, when day-wide precision is required
      • From: Andrew Lindesay <email@hidden>
    • Re: Recording and looking up dates, when day-wide precision is required
      • From: Lachlan Deck <email@hidden>
    • Re: Recording and looking up dates, when day-wide precision is required
      • From: Peter Vandoros <email@hidden>
References: 
 >Recording and looking up dates, when day-wide precision is required (From: Florijan Stamenkovic <email@hidden>)
 >Re: Recording and looking up dates, when day-wide precision is required (From: Lachlan Deck <email@hidden>)
 >Re: Recording and looking up dates, when day-wide precision is required (From: Florijan Stamenkovic <email@hidden>)
 >Re: Recording and looking up dates, when day-wide precision is required (From: Lachlan Deck <email@hidden>)
 >Re: Recording and looking up dates, when day-wide precision is required (From: Florijan Stamenkovic <email@hidden>)
 >Re: Recording and looking up dates, when day-wide precision is required (From: Lachlan Deck <email@hidden>)
 >Re: Recording and looking up dates, when day-wide precision is required (From: Andrew Lindesay <email@hidden>)
 >Re: Recording and looking up dates, when day-wide precision is required (From: Lachlan Deck <email@hidden>)

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