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I'm working on an app that will be used by the public services (ambulance). Since those people work around the clock, they will realistically need to enter date/time values at ANY time of the day. Which also includes DST changeover times.

Now, when entering the time at the "short" day, things are easy. Simply any value between 3:00:00 and 3:59:59 is invalid. Problem is with the "long" day, where values in that same interval are ambiguous.

Is there any standard way/notation for entering time at that dreadful hour? Have you ever used any other workarounds, and which ones did your users find good?

Added: Also cloned on ux.stackexchange.

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Vilx-
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  • Related question: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2532729/daylight-saving-time-and-timezone-best-practices – Oded Feb 01 '12 at 11:28

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Allow the user to enter the localised time (i.e. whatever their PC clock is displaying) but save it in UTC. When you display them remember to use a localised time method and it will fix itself, see this SO Question for more details: How to display localized date and time information to web users with ASP.NET

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Mauro
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  • Well, that's cute (and obvious), but how do I know which "3:30" he meant, if this localised time comes twice today? – Vilx- Feb 04 '12 at 11:56
  • Not sure what the downvote was for... After the time changes the first 3:30 would be displayed as 2:30 whilst the second one would be displayed as 3:30... its pretty simple really... – Mauro Feb 05 '12 at 19:43
  • I think you don't understand the question. Suppose there's someone entering the dates & times for next week. He comes to the place where some doctor is scheduled to be on duty one hour from 3:30(a) to 3:30(b) - exactly the time when the DST changeover occurs. What is he supposed to enter in the "from" textbox and what in the "to" textbox? – Vilx- Feb 06 '12 at 09:38
  • In that case you'd need to allow the scheduler to select the fact that the first time is DST and the second time has no offset. – Mauro Feb 06 '12 at 09:55
  • by tagging with UTC and the offset for DST you'd be able to see that one was 3:30 DST (i.e. 2:30 under non DST)... the article shows how to do it. Its how most systems work. If you dont want to tag with DST then let the system do it automatically. Your server OS should recognise the fact that its now non DST time and reflect it as such in its use of UTC. – Mauro Mar 05 '12 at 08:52