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Dates and time zones

  • 26 April 2023
  • 5 replies
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  • 18 replies

Hello!

I was reading docs regarding custom time zones as well as custom time dimensions, and I’m still not sure how to deal best with users different time zones and proper display of dates.

Most of our users are in Pacific Standard Time zone, however, our data are stored in UTC format. Because by default there’s no support for timestamps, we’re sending only dates to GoodData. But this causes some dates are displayed differently in GoodData and in the main application. For example Apr 21, 2023 - 6:13pm Pacific time displayed in the app is already 22/04/2023 in GoodData (as it’s UTC).

One solution I see is to normalize dates from UTC to timezone that should be used in a given workspace for data upload. That would work well if all workspace users were in the same time zone.

Would there be any good solution that could work for a workspace that can be used by users in different time zones? So they could see base date displayed in their desired zone? I don’t see how custom time dimension could help here, as if I understand it correctly, it’s rather for proper data filtering and segmentation and not for dynamically formatting dates.

Best,

Hanna

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Best answer by Julius Kos 26 April 2023, 15:33

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Userlevel 2

Hello Hanka, 

 

The only relevant documentation would be custom time zones in this case. Unfortunately, there is no out of box solution which would cover your whole use-case. Currently, the best available option is to set custom time zone on a workspace level to reflect the local time of most users within the particular workspace.

Hi Julius,

And is there a way of setting custom time zone other than via grey pages? For example during provisioning or via API?

Userlevel 2

You can definitely use the API as well. Please see the API docs for the reference: 

https://help.gooddata.com/doc/enterprise/en/expand-your-gooddata-platform/api-reference/#operation/setProjecTimezone

 

 

Hi again, I’m looking for a way to display timezone information for users on the dashboards, but can’t find an easy way. What are the possibilities?

 

Best,

Hanna

Userlevel 3

Hi Hanka, it should be possible to add an attribute to the dashboard that would contain this information; another option could be displaying this information in your app if you are working with embedded dashboards or there also exist the possibility to add descriptions to dashboards via plugins, but for this option you would need to reach out to your Account Executive to coordinate the implementation with our Professional Services Team (paid service).

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