Handling cases when a timezone isn't applicable

rubyonrails-core
1

I've run into the following issue:

My app has multiple users from multiple timezones. In the majority of cases, I want datetime columns to take into account the user's timezone. This works fine.

However, for *one* particular datetime field, I want users to enter the arrival date & time of a flight that is arriving into a country in a different timezone to the user's timezone. Hence I don't want any timezone conversion done on this particular field.

e.g. a user in Germany enters the data for a flight that will arrive in New Zealand on January 1st at 2:00pm. When a different user views this data, I want it to say 2:00pm, regardless of the user's timezone.

I don't see that the datetime_select helper allows me to specify a timezone for the time I am selecting; but anyway, I don't want the user to have to enter a timezone.

I suppose the easiest (only?) solution is to store the data in separate date and time fields in the database, and use separate date_select and time_select helpers.

Any comments? Should this functionality be something that datetimes / datetime_select should support?

Cheers Dave

2

Dave,

You can currently opt out of time zone aware attributes for specific attributes like so:

class Flight < ActiveRecord::Base   ...   self.skip_time_zone_conversion_for_attributes = [:departure_time, :arrival_time]   ... end

With this setup, no time zone conversions will be done for Flight#departure_time and #arrival time.

Does this give you what you need?

Geoff

3

Yes! That's exactly what I need. Thank you very much -- far nicer than overriding arrival_time and arrival_time= which is what I had ended up doing.