Rails - Jun 2011 - Fun With Time Zones Rails 2.3.8

Hello everyone,

A user enters the time of an event and the time zone of the event. Before
validation in the model, I set the zone of the time entered to the one
chosen (only changing the zone, not the time)

self.starts_at.zone = time_zone

extending ActiveSupport thus ...

module ActiveSupport
  class TimeWithZone
    def zone=(new_zone = ::Time.zone)
      # Reinitialize with the new zone and the local time
      initialize(nil, ::Time.__send__(:get_zone, new_zone), time)
    end
  end
end

and that gets saved nicely in the DB as UTC.

Upon editing that record, I keep getting different time zones being
displayed and they change upon page refresh or a new request.

Here is an example of the output after a refresh ...

http://i.imgur.com/jbKJC.jpg

Here are the relevant fields after being retrieved in the edit action
@event.to_yaml

attributes:
  starts_at: 2011-07-08 17:00:00
  invitation_expiry: 2011-07-08 16:50:00
  time_zone: Pacific Time (US & Canada)
attributes_cache:
  starts_at: 2011-07-08 17:00:00 Z
  invitation_expiry: 2011-07-08 16:50:00 Z

And here''s some simple debug output from the relevant requests

logger.debug @event.starts_at.zone
# -> PDT
logger.debug @event.starts_at
    # -> 2011-07-08 10:00:00 -0700
logger.debug @event.starts_at.in_time_zone(@event.time_zone) # -> 2011-07-08
10:00:00 -0700
logger.debug @event.starts_at.in_time_zone(''UTC'')             
#
-> 2011-07-08 17:00:00 UTC

logger.debug @event.starts_at.zone
# -> UTC
logger.debug @event.starts_at
    # -> 2011-07-08 17:00:00 UTC
logger.debug @event.starts_at.in_time_zone(@event.time_zone) # -> 2011-07-08
10:00:00 -0700
logger.debug @event.starts_at.in_time_zone(''UTC'')             
#
-> 2011-07-08 17:00:00 UTC


Now, I thought Rails would do all the magic and convert my UTC time (from
the DB) in to the time zone that I set. As you can see, it does sometimes
but as it''s random, it''s obviously not doing what I thought it
would.

This takes me back to my mod_perl days of sometimes it works, sometimes it
doesn''t.

Does anyone have any insight in to this, please.

Any pointers would be great. Thanks

-ants

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