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Time offset for a specific location, date and time


It would be useful to have a Synergy subroutine/function that could provide information as to what Time, or TimeZone offset prevailed for location as of a specific UTC Date and Time.

For example, pass:
       UTC Date:  11/05/2020, 
       UTC Time:  14:23:17
       Locality:  Connecticut (or GPS coordinates, or something)

Return:
      The offset between the UTC and local time for that Date/Time, or
      the actual Date/Time for that locality for the specified UTC Date/Time 

The issue is that when one has a UTC time that is not the current date/time (even if it's stale by only a few seconds), and needs to convert that into the local time that was applicable for that UTC date/time, one needs to know whether Standard or Daylight Savings Time applied for the Location, Date and Time in question.  
 

1 Comment | Posted by Bill Ferris to Synergy DBL on 8/18/2021 4:45 PM
Steve Ives
Hi Bill. We have discussed this, and the long and short of it is that there is no obvious cross-platform way of achieving this on all of the platforms that we support, and also, in some parts of the world, timezones change on a surprisingly frequent basis.

To me, this is a perfect example of when to use web services. In this case, you would probably need to call two web services, one to do geocoding of a physical location like "Sacramento, CA", or a full address, into LAT and LNG coordinates, and another to determine either the current time at that location or the UTC offset.

I'm pretty sure that both Azure and Google have API that could be used to do this, and a quick internet search uncovered several other services that might be useful:

9/21/2021 4:35 PM   0  
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