Working with Date Time and Timezones is always headache. Recently we faced issue with calendar events generated by our sitecore application in different regions. The start date and end date in generated ICS file was failing to show exact date time specific to end user because of the difference in timezones.
Why that happened?
Curretly there is no mechanism in sitecore to store date and time in different timezones. It simply considers the server timezone - on which the sitecore instance runs - and stores date time accordingly. So, to make datetime field independent of any specific timezone (more specifically - server timezone) , we needed a custom field that stores UTC (Universal Coordinated Time) , a globally unique datetime, as raw value and presents timezone specific date and time to the content authors.
Note: We can easily do conversion of UTC to any timezone and visa versa, with .NET globalization API
How this prototype works?
Here is how the new field looks to content authors.
This is what sitecore stores in backend.
You can notice the raw value is the UTC equivalent of the IST time content authors can see. And this is the secret of this field :)
You might be wondering from where the the timezone India Standard Time is coming??
- In our application, we have separated all settings from actual content items, and those settings are globally applicable to entire site (something like AppSettings in .net application)
- So here the timezone IST is coming from site level settings, which looks like this
- Based on above selection, only the display date and time will change, but the raw value will remain same.
