Dates are adjusted for users only at midnight on my xpages

Question

We have a really strange problem in xpages regarding dates, the Notesdocument we have contain a date field and the value is only a date, there is no time portion.

In the xpage I have specified to display the date as a date/time value. the date display correctly on the webpage but we are now getting reports from users who login at night (around midnight) and see the date as adjusted by one day. if the same people login at daytime the date is correct so this only seem to happend around midnight

I have tried to change my clock on my client to around midnight but that does not reproduce it so I assume this is a server issue.

The domino server have correct date/time and we are using the latest version of Domino

any ideas?

Answer 1

The issue is related to not having the TimeZone specified in the date / time field. We ran into this just yesterday. If you don't have the TZ specified, it seems to assume UTC and will adjust accordingly. Include the time zone and your field will stop adjusting erroneously.

Answer 2

we encountered the same problem recently and, I believe, found a very nice solution.

system treats the pure date as a date in UTC time zone. Date value is automatically converted into server's time zone. So the question is how to prevent conversion?

this code prevents conversion:

<xp:this.converter>
    <xp:convertDateTime 
        type="date" 
        ignoreUserTimeZone="true" 
        dateStyle="long" 
        timeZone="UTC">
    </xp:convertDateTime>
</xp:this.converter>

pay attention at "timeZone" attribute.

Answer 3

Perhaps it has to do with this ? http://www-304.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21508734

I've seen some reports about XPages Dates and TimeZone Issues

Answer 4

I suspect your Domino version was 8.5.3, because there were 2 APAR, LO72278 and LO67745, on similar problems against 8.5.3. Fixpack 3 addresses them.

The root cause is that Lotus Notes allows you to save a "Date" with no time or zone and the Notes server has a default Time Zone setting to interpret these incomplete things called dates. XPages doesn't play by the same rules, and its master Java wants to know what zone you're using, and looks to the system for some clue, and generally will use midnight within some TZ to refer to a "Date". There is a whole region on Stack Overflow on the "how to store/represent a date" topic - [datetime] - since languages and DBMS each have their own approach.

Nice legacy Notes focused article about it. http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/ddwiki.nsf/dx/05022009100728PMAGU5MB.htm

XPages article about it http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/ddwiki.nsf/dx/XPagesTimeZones.htm

Too bad they are not totally on the same page, I assume each release gets closer.