B
Bookham Measures
Hello
Currently we have an ASP + SQL Server website running for a UK audience.
The server, W2K, is set to UK (£, dd/mm/yyyy), GMT with daylight saving etc.
All our ASPs have <%@ LCID=2057%> at the top to ensure no date or currency
symbol ambiguity.
We wish to open our application up to the world, (although only working with
GBP, Euros and USD), and do not want to run in to any time/locale issues.
Upon registration the user will select their timezone.
The website does scheduling for want of a better description, so people are
creating events with dates and times. I would like to have your opinions as
to the best way to go about controlling the time within ASP and/or SQL
Server. For example, if I create an event for 2-September-2005 at 1600, I
would like the date and time displayed according to the viewers time zone
selection. 1600 in the UK will be 1700 in Germany and 1100 in New York.
At the moment I think I need to set the server back to GMT with no daylight
saving observed. Then, store all dates and times, for simplicity, in the
database as GMT. So when inserting values the times will be converted to
GMT and when extracting values the times will be converted to the visitors
timezone from GMT, based on their earlier timezone selection. I do not
believe that Windows can give me the conversion values required as I am not
sure how good it is at daylight saving around the world etc. I have been
looking at this product from worldtimeserver.com, (see COM+ component
details): http://www.worldtimeserver.com/time_zone_guide/. They allege to
have all the required info and provide a COM object that can do the
conversion from and to UTC.
Regarding input validation and that sort of thing, I am planning to allow
the user to select their country and will use Session.LCID to perform
validation on dates etc. So, IsDate(#25/12/2005#) will return true when the
LCID is set to 2057 and IsDate(#12/25/2005#) will also return true when the
LCID is 1033. I have yet to look in to validating on the client side as I
use JavaScript and it is probably better at it and will of course be done,
(hopefully not by string manipulation), on the client's PC.
I am sure that many of you out there have already overcome this challenge
and I would appreciate any advice you would be prepared to offer.
Thanks for your time.
David
Currently we have an ASP + SQL Server website running for a UK audience.
The server, W2K, is set to UK (£, dd/mm/yyyy), GMT with daylight saving etc.
All our ASPs have <%@ LCID=2057%> at the top to ensure no date or currency
symbol ambiguity.
We wish to open our application up to the world, (although only working with
GBP, Euros and USD), and do not want to run in to any time/locale issues.
Upon registration the user will select their timezone.
The website does scheduling for want of a better description, so people are
creating events with dates and times. I would like to have your opinions as
to the best way to go about controlling the time within ASP and/or SQL
Server. For example, if I create an event for 2-September-2005 at 1600, I
would like the date and time displayed according to the viewers time zone
selection. 1600 in the UK will be 1700 in Germany and 1100 in New York.
At the moment I think I need to set the server back to GMT with no daylight
saving observed. Then, store all dates and times, for simplicity, in the
database as GMT. So when inserting values the times will be converted to
GMT and when extracting values the times will be converted to the visitors
timezone from GMT, based on their earlier timezone selection. I do not
believe that Windows can give me the conversion values required as I am not
sure how good it is at daylight saving around the world etc. I have been
looking at this product from worldtimeserver.com, (see COM+ component
details): http://www.worldtimeserver.com/time_zone_guide/. They allege to
have all the required info and provide a COM object that can do the
conversion from and to UTC.
Regarding input validation and that sort of thing, I am planning to allow
the user to select their country and will use Session.LCID to perform
validation on dates etc. So, IsDate(#25/12/2005#) will return true when the
LCID is set to 2057 and IsDate(#12/25/2005#) will also return true when the
LCID is 1033. I have yet to look in to validating on the client side as I
use JavaScript and it is probably better at it and will of course be done,
(hopefully not by string manipulation), on the client's PC.
I am sure that many of you out there have already overcome this challenge
and I would appreciate any advice you would be prepared to offer.
Thanks for your time.
David