Question

Best way to Convert Time Zone from Central To Eastern Time

Asked by: rahulbagal

My ASP.net application resides on a server with  central  time. from the same server I am pushing a web service request to another application. Now in that web service I am asked to send time in Eastern Time Zone for one parameter.

What would be the best way to convert time from Central Time Zone to Eastern Time Zone in C# .net 1.1  ? This should also consider daylight savings etc.

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Asked On
2008-04-02 at 00:12:44ID23288303
Tags

C#,ASP.net ( .net 1.1 )

Topics

Microsoft Visual C#.Net

,

Programming for ASP.NET

Participating Experts
2
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0
Comments
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Answers

 

by: DhaestPosted on 2008-04-02 at 00:22:51ID: 21260738

You are going to have to do this yourself. Unfortunately, you can only get the TimeZone instance that corresponds to the current system time zone, not any others (which is foolish in my opinion). You will have to keep a table of timezones as well as the offsets, and then adjust your date time instance accordingly.

A sample code can be found at
http://www.dotnet247.com/247reference/msgs/46/230600.aspx

 

by: rahulbagalPosted on 2008-04-02 at 01:07:08ID: 21260917

Thanks Dhaest ..
But one post says to get timezone info from registry .
To Read the registry for the timezone info is always not possible because IIS user may not have that privilege.

What I am doing currently is there is one hour offset from CST to EST .
So I am adding that offset in CST to convert to EST.
Will this work every time ?
I mean during daylightsaving etc.
I just want to know what is the perfect way to do it .

		private static DateTime ConvertToEastern (DateTime  MessageDate)		
		{	
			// This function works assuming running on Central Time 
			DateTime utcTime = Convert.ToDateTime(MessageDate).ToUniversalTime();   // Converting System time zone to universal time zone
			// Get offset of Current Time Zone  from GMT 
			TimeSpan utcOffset  = TimeZone.CurrentTimeZone.GetUtcOffset( DateTime.Now ) ;
			// Difference Between CST & EST 
			TimeSpan DiffESTCST = new TimeSpan(0,1,0,0);
			// EST = GMT + utc offset + 1 Hour 
			DateTime convertToEastern = utcTime.Add(utcOffset).Add(DiffESTCST);
			return convertToEastern;
		}

                                              
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by: DhaestPosted on 2008-04-02 at 01:34:00ID: 21261029

The problem is that timezone information is not directly available through the web browser.  You could use heuristics to determine the correct time zone or you will have to store the timezone settings for a user based on their selection.  

Once you have the timezone settings you now need to translate the times.  You should always store your date/time values in the DB in UTC.  This eliminates many conversion issues.  If you store the information in UTC then you need only translate from UTC to the user's local timezone when you display the data to them and you need to convert from their time zone to UTC when you get date/time values from them.  

What makes this more difficult is the fact that the TimeZone class is not all that useful.  Fortunately in v2.0 DateTime was updated to support an indicator on whether the time is in UTC or not.  You can convert a DateTime to UTC using the DateTime.ToUniversalTime method.  Unfortunately however you can't convert it back.  The ToLocalTime method uses the local time zone which, when run on the server, uses the server's time zone which isn't what you wanted.  Even worse however is that you can't simply create a TimeZone object and use it as that support doesn't exist.  Michael Brumm (http://www.michaelbrumm.simpletimezone.html) created a nice little class for being able to create and use time zones easily.  Here are the steps to convert from a DB UTC value to the local user's time zone.

1) Get the stored timezone value for the user
2) Create a SimpleTimeZone class to wrap it (using some mapping scheme that maps a DB value to the underlying Windows registry version)
3) Use the SimpleTimeZone.ToLocalTime method to convert the DateTime value to the local time.

For performance reasons you should probably get and initialize the SimpleTimeZone instance and cache it in the Items property for the length of the request so you don't have to keep creating it.

For converting from the user's local timezone to UTC do the reverse:

1) Get the stored timezone value from the user
2) Create a SimpleTimeZone class to wrap it
3) Use SimpleTimeZone.ToUniversalTime method to convert the DateTime to UTC.

Source: http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=481669&SiteID=1

 

by: DhaestPosted on 2008-04-02 at 01:36:30ID: 21261046

You can always get the timezone of the user through javascript

<html> 
 
<body> 
 
<form name='detect' method='post' action='somepage.php'> 
 
<input type='hidden' name='tz' value='unknown'> 
 
</form> 
 
Detecting timezone... 
 
<a href='somepage.asp'>Click Here</a> if this page does not automatically redirect... 
 
<script type='text/javascript'> 
 
var now = new Date(); 
 
document.detect.tz.value = now.gettimezoneoffset(); 
 
document.detect.submit(); 
 
</script> 
 
</body> 
 
</html> 
                                              
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by: deepaknetPosted on 2008-04-03 at 01:41:19ID: 21270579

This MSDN page has a lucid example outlining this issue:

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.timezone.aspx

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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