In my app, users can select a time that they want to receive a daily email. I then regularly run a script to find users who have an upcoming email to send and send it. So, if users elect to have an email that goes out at 7AM, I look for users with that selected as their time and send it.
The problem is of course timezones. I'm going to have users in different timezones and need 7AM to always be 7AM, regardless of timezones or daylight savings.
I can understand how to do it for display purposes, but I can't find much info on executing queries that have to factor in the timezone and DST for a collection of users with varying times and timezones.
This can probably be most easily accomplished by simply saving everything in the database as UTC. You can adjust the times for display and incoming form data by using the users' specified time zone.
Related
I am trying to set up a time and date to schedule an appointment, so I collect the date first and verify that times are available on that date. Then I try to collect a time for that date, if that time does not exist I want the customer to be able to ask something like, "How about Friday at 6pm." and it will change the date. Is there an easy way or workaround to get this functionality?
Hey I have a rails application and a bunch of users and I want to send them a message once per day at a preferred local time of the user's choice. (A message is a text, email, or chatbot notification.)
I believe I could add something to my User model that would allow for something to be performed every 24 hours at the preferred time but I'm not sure specifically how to implement that AND I also don't know how to remove these jobs from the queue if, for example, the user changes their preferred time or they want to disable messages all together.
Any thoughts on how I could do this?
Where is your application hosted?
You can have a cron task or a scheduler (Heroku) that runs every hour (or every 10 minutes). It would query in a users preferences table searching for users who want to receive the email at this moment (or in a range near this moment, such as the next 10 minutes).
time = Time.now
#users = User.include(:settings).where(“settings.receive_email_at between ? and ?”, time, time + 10.minutes)
You may need some changes to handle timezones and to avoid sending duplicate emails, but that’s just an idea.
It's simple. Build two models - One to store user and its time mapping (UserTimeMapping) and the second one to create a unique entry for each day when a message is sent to user (UserMessage).
Write a cron task which runs every 10 minutes and pulls all the records from UserTimeMapping which are to be executed for next 10 minutes and schedules a worker task for the exact time (say MessageTriggerWorker). The worker has to check in UserMessage table whether a record exists for the given user_id for today and if yes it has to return without performing any task. If that is not the case then it should send the message and create a record in the UserMessage table.
I'm using custom command to import data for newly created item in Sitecore. Since there is a lot of data importing, this process is in the background. I send an email with import status once it is completed. I am able to get email from UserProfile:
User currentUser = Sitecore.Context.User;
UserProfile currentProfile = currentUser.Profile;
The problem is that we have import starting time in the email. Since I haven't find where the user time zone is stored, I can't adjust it to match the user time zone.
Do you happen to know if there is any setting to define user time zone from the C# code?
P.S. In the bottom right corner there is a correct time adjusted for the current user, but I didn't find any information on how and where it stored
I'm not sure it's stored (in fact I believe Sitecore stores DateTime relative to the CM server and not the client).
For you to have an accurate timezone for the visitor/customer, you'd need to either ask for it directly (registration prompt or user profile option) or look it up using Geo data from the originating ip (though with VPNs and public access points this becomes increasingly less reliable).
My suggestion would be to store the start time in UTC and (if necessary) let the user know it was started at that time. If a time elapsed is required, perform the calculation before sending the email off--since start time and end time are relative to the server anyways, just let them know it took "5min 30sec" to complete. If they receive the email at 5:08pm (email timestamp) they can do some simple match and assume it was started at 5:03 (or thereabouts).
I believe the time in the bottom right of the Desktop is using the users local system time (most likely using JavaScript) so it is not dependent on their Sitecore user profile.
There doesn't appear to be any timezone information stored against the user profile, the best you can get the is the CultureInfo based on the Regional ISO Code, although this still is not truly accurate for countries with multiple timezones (USA, Canada, Russia, Australia etc).
You could extend the User Profile to add custom properties and store a timezone field, but it is not available by default.
My suggestion would be to list the start time in UTC time, and let the user mentally adjust to their own timezone. This is what I have done previously, esp since servers themselves could be located in any location.
I am working on rails 4 application. I want to show the time for comment I created. If I open the site in india then time should be shown in IST (according to indian standard) and If I am in USA so for the same comment that i made in india time should be shown according to USA time zone.
What do I need to do in my config file for development and production?
Do I need to change anything in database?
Please help me.
Rails always saves times in UTC (universal time), and the server has a setting which tells it which timezone it (the server) is running in.
To show different times to the client, Rails (which runs on the server) will need to know which time zone the client is in. This isn't in a standard request header so you will need to get them to submit the information somehow. Once you know their timezone you can ensure that you always show times to the user using their timezone - there are helpers for this.
Getting their timezone can be done explicitly, eg by giving them a timezone dropdown in their "My Account" page, and then saving that in their user record, and/or by making it more upfront and forcing them to choose one in a popup, if you don't know it.
Or, you can do it for them using Javascript, passing it through in a cookie. See this article for an example of how to do it.
http://thisbythem.com/blog/clientside-timezone-detection/
Well one solution can be to store the time zone of the user in the database, write a filter
around_action in your ApplicationController which would set the Time.zone to the time_zone from the database field.
You might want to look at Time.zone and TimeZone in the rails api
Here is a railscast , you can figure it out from the comments and the github link.
I'm working on a Rails application that's kind of like a blog. Users create Entries. I'm trying to work out how to handle time storage and display. I've read this writeup about Rails timezone support.
It's great but it doesn't cover what my app needs to do. It only looks at cases where you want to convert stored time to the current logged in user's time zone. In contrast, the effect I want is...
A user creates an entry in California at 10:00 a.m.
A couple years later he moves to New York and then at some point looks at his old entry. The "created" date should say "10:00 a.m." He doesn't care about time zones. He just wants to know what time of day he felt like it was when he wrote the entry.
If he then edits the Entry in New York the displayed "modified" date is, again, his subjective time of day when he made the edit. (Let's assume he went to "preferences" and changed his time zone setting when he moved.)
Also, for the sake of thoroughness, the app should be able to report the "real" absolute time when an Entry was created or updated.
(Note -- my imaginary user is a guy, but for women it should work roughly the same way.)
The way I'm thinking of implementing it is...
Have the attributes User#time_zone, Entry#created_at_utc, and Entry#updated_at_utc in addition to the standard created_at and updated_at.
The user selects their time zone from a menu when they sign up. (They can change it later if they want.)
The app uses User#time_zone to store created_at and updated_at in the user's subjective local time. If it's 10:00 a.m. for them, the app writes "10:00 a.m." to the DB.
The app also saves the current UTC time in the aforementioned _utc fields to deal with the last requirement above.
Is that a good way to do it? Is there a better way?
The two roads you can take are:
Store a timezone (UTC) in the user account as well as in every post - update the post's timezone along with the updated_at field whenever the user changes the post (if he or she has changed timezones).
Store the timezone only in the user account. When the user changes timezones, update every post that belongs to the user and add/subtract to the created_at/updated_at dates.
The first option seems like the cleanest option to take. For this you would only have to create a new method in your post record:
def locational_updated_at
updated_at + timezone.seconds
end
Where timezone is an integer containing the seconds since UTC.
If you can, you should avoid storing two different sets of timestamps, and you should avoid storing any non-UTC dates. Both of these things will lead to confusion. I'm not completely sure I understand what you're doing (though I like your idea of subjective time), but wouldn't it be enough to just attach a time zone to every post, and always use that zone to display the times? It would default to the time zone set in the author's account, so he could change it when he moved cross-country without affecting previous posts.
I think that's all you need--to attach a time zone to every post. Is that sufficient? Or am I missing some part of this?