[daisy] [JIRA] Updated: (DSY-41) possibility to configure Daisy time differently than server system time

[Bruno Dumon (JIRA)]

     [ http://issues.cocoondev.org//browse/DSY-41?page=all ]

Bruno Dumon updated DSY-41:
---------------------------

    Fix Version: public - 2.0
    Environment: 

I've been thinking a bit about this issue as it would be a good improvement if Daisy would support timezones. In particular, it would be interesting related to import-export.

Here's what I've come up with:

In the database, we could store all dates (and datetimes) always in GMT, irrespective of the server timezone. This allows to move database dumps from one side to the world to the other, and the dates would still have the same meaning.

In the Java API, we currently use java.util.Date objects, which do not contain timezone information. We should replace this by using java.util.Calendar instead.

When loading from the database, the timezone would be converted from GMT to the one of the current server. When storing, the timezone would be converted from whathever timezone is specified in the calendar object (usually the server time zone, but could be anything) to GMT.

In the XML messages, dates are already transported including timezone information, XMLBeans also uses java.util.Calendar to represent dates.

For dates rendered for display to the user, we could by default show them as is (in the timezone of the server), and in addition allow to:
  - specify an alternate time zone in the wiki config
  - let the user specify a timezone in his user settings.

While needing to look at date formatting anyway, we could then also look into make date formatting patterns configurable. Date formatting happens in various locations:
  - the publisher: pattern could be specified in pub request
  - query results: pattern could be specified via query option
  - wiki: also formats dates in various locations, including the date fields in the document editor
For all of these above, the formatting pattern to use could be configured in the wiki (again possibly with user-specific override) and passed on to these uses.

A separate thing that also formats dates are the email notifications, since this runs in the repository server this component would need its own configuration.

Daisy 2.0 seems a good occasion to tackle this, as it will cause some slight Java-API backwards incompatibility. That's why I'm now changing scheduling this issue for Daisy 2.0, though I have no view on whether there'll actually be time to work on this.

> possibility to configure Daisy time differently than server system time
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>          Key: DSY-41
>          URL: http://issues.cocoondev.org//browse/DSY-41
>      Project: Daisy
>         Type: New Feature
>     Reporter: Steven Noels
>     Priority: Minor
>      Fix For: public - 2.0

>
> Time stamps are currently based on the server system time. It would be nice to be able to shift that independent of the server configuration - i.e. system time is EST but Daisy time stamps are in CEST or GMT+1.

-- 
This message is automatically generated by JIRA.
-
If you think it was sent incorrectly contact one of the administrators:
   http://issues.cocoondev.org//secure/Administrators.jspa
-
For more information on JIRA, see:
   http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira