TimeZones in Java

Question

I am allowing users on my web app to schedule events based on time zones of their choice.

I want to present a good list of time zones to the end user and then conver

Answer 1

You can reduce the list with TZ IDs which match only the following regexp

^(Africa|America|Asia|Atlantic|Australia|Europe|Indian|Pacific)/.*

Answer 2

If you need the granularity of choosing exactly how the list would look, I would use the best hard-coded list I could find (this is a good example) and ensure it is displayed and converted as precisely as possible.

Just keep in mind that each one of those 585 time zones does have a semantic meaning (such as DST for example) and users might want to choose the best time zone for them. Although I do agree that list can be much shorter.

Answer 3

With that many, I wouldn't try to shoehorn them into a select box list.... I'd put them on a list in a separate modal dialog (or popup, if you must), let the user scroll through and click the name they want. They would click on a link in the modal dialog, and it would populate a text field with the correct code, and you could then submit that to your server.

Better yet, have them click their location on a map of the world, and use an image map to translate that location to the appropriate time zone.