D
dbeavon
Guest
Has anyone worked with apps that need to interact with users from multiple timezones? I find the existing ABL programming API to be very cumbersome in the area of datetime's and timezone conversion. I hope that Progress will consider building some OO classes whose semantics are easier to work with. One of the bigger problems is that certain data-types are named exactly the same as functions that operate on those types (eg. DATETIME and DATETIME-TZ). Additionally, certain of those functions have a number of overloaded variations which work in substantially different ways, despite having the same name. Additionally some of these functions interact auto-magically with a "session" variable, SESSION:TIMEZONE , which is an offset in minutes from UTC. This "feature" has been a source of actual bugs in prior versions of OE ABL. Apparently Progress has trouble with this API as well. Whenever I'm working with datetimes and converting them back and forth between UTC and the local timezone of the user, I have to refer to a bunch of my previously written (& trusted) code to avoid introducing bugs. The same is true for other members of my team, who currently consider me the "timezone expert". This stuff is not confusing except insofar as the ABL programming API makes it so. There should be no need of a "timezone expert". Perhaps it would be better if the questions were posted to this forum, so that one day these ABL-timezone-related questions will come up in google search results.
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