[rt-users] Displaying times in local user's timezone (worldwide support)?

[Craig Ringer]

Hi all

I'm in the process of implementing RT to replace a custom Eventum fork
with Pg support and a few hacks that we're running.

Since we offer 24x7 support and a strong SLA, RT provides some very
useful features, especially with RT::Extension::SLA and Business::Hours
. However, I'm running into a surprising and unexpected problem with
time zones. At this point it's a trial instance with low ticket volumes
and user counts, and RT's paid support doesn't really have a casual
entry-level option suitable for "we're thinking of using RT, how would
you meet this requirement". So I'm asking you for ideas.

It seems that RT displays times in the server time zone. It doesn't seem
to have a field in the user data to set the user's time zone, nor does
it respect the browser's timezone, which is discoverable using
JavaScript like:

    -new Date().getTimezoneOffset()/60;

(this'll handle half- and quarter-hour timezones fine too).

I can add a CustomField for the user's time zone and get them to set it,
and I can give it a default value of "autodetect" that uses some JS to
detect the browser time zone. Ugly, but viable for providing the client
timezone to RT. That's only half the answer, though.

The problem is that as far as I can tell RT doesn't differentiate
between server time and local client time. The user object has no time
zone attribute. RT doesn't appear to have an internal field for "client
time offset" or do any conversion of server time to local time for
display. The only way I can see to control time display is to use a
scrip/overlay to set the Perl interpreter timezone for each FastCGI
instance. I'm really concerned about this hack, though; I strongly
suspect it'll break RT::Extension::SLA and Business::Hours - plus times
should always be stored in the database in the server time zone, and I
don't think this approach would permit that.

Am I missing something? How are other people who're offering 24x7
world-wide support handling time zones? Just setting the server time to
UTC and showing UTC times across the app? This will work, but from a
usability perspective it sucks, especially since RT doesn't annotate
displayed times with the timezone they're in.

If I have to I'll live with UTC times for now and look at how hard it'd
be to patch RT to support differentiating between client and server
time. I'm really hoping there's a good answer to this that I'm just
totally missing, though.

Ideas/suggestions?

-- 
 Craig Ringer                   http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
 PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Training & Services

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.bestpractical.com/pipermail/rt-users/attachments/20130213/83653a56/attachment.htm>