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I have the following the scenario...

I want to set an alarm for myself on my mobile device for 30 days from today (at noon). I also want to do the same for a number of other people in a number of different timezones.

I DON'T want to convert 30 days at noon MY local time into whatever their local time is. (I'm on US Pacific time - I DON'T want US East Coast users to experience the alarm at 3PM.) Instead, I want those others to experience the alarm 30 days from now at noon THEIR local time.

So what is the best practice for storing this type of date/time information? Storing UTC doesn't make sense here. In these cases, do people typically just store the date and time in strings and then use those to generate local times on local machines?

Paul
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1 Answers1

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Indeed, it sounds like you should keep track of simply the date and time that you want the event to fire, either with respect to the end-user's time zone - or perhaps without a time zone at all (to infer their local zone).

This has been covered before, several times such as here.

You didn't indicate what programming language or database environment you are using, but in general you shouldn't store date/time values as strings, but instead you should use a data type appropriate for the scenario you are in. Some of them may be UTC-based, but many are not.

Matt Johnson-Pint
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