Get UTC time given TZID and local time - javascript

I am trying to parse the .ics file in my application. My application has server side java layer and client side javascript part to it. I am using ical4j library to parse it.
Problem is DTSTART of the event is not in UTC format sometimes. And whenever it is not in UTC .ics file has VTIMEZONE component which I am parsing and getting TZID property from it.
Java layer finally send JSON to client. In the above mentioned case DTSTART, DTEND and TZID are being sent in JSON.
Client has to convert DTSTART and DTEND to UTC using TZID. I tried with moment.js since i could not find any other api which can do this.
moment.tz("2014-02-06 05:30", "NorthAmerica/Eastern").format()
With moment.js below is the error I get,
TypeError: Cannot call method 'rule' of undefined
But below code works fine,
moment.tz("2014-02-06 17:30", "America/Toronto").format()
Is it not possible to use TZID as is (i.e NorthAmerica/Eastern) from .ics file?
Also Is there any other way or JS library which can give me UTC with all timezones and also considering Observance?

you should be aware that the icalendar specification RFC5545 clearly states in the TZID, that:
This document does not define a naming convention for
time zone identifiers. Implementers may want to use the naming
conventions defined in existing time zone specifications such
as the public-domain TZ database [TZDB]. The specification of
globally unique time zone identifiers is not addressed by this
document and is left for future study.
so clearly while America/Toronto is listed in Olsson database (see here), America/Eastern is not which explains why your JS library cannot recognize it.
For a robust design you would need to either convert on server side to UTC or to have an actual JS class capable to parse ICS VTIMEZONE component.

Related

how to subtract php date from Javascript date

I create project with php Laravel framework and VueJS and I want to get the difference between server time and client time to process some data time out by Javascript in the client browser.
How can i do that?
I need to change the format of one of the dates to be available to manage by other language functions and property.
how to sub (minus) Carbon::now() got from php api Date.Now() in JS.
I do that to get the difference between client clock and the server.
In order to "speak" in dates, the best practice is to work with timestamps.
The server can have its own timezone offset which is why it is best that it will expose any managed dates in UTC.
The client, on the other hand, will need to convert the UTC timestamp to its locale date, which can be done by adding its timezone offset.
Having said that - you will probably want to calculate the data timeout on the server, since the client can be bypassed, thus exposing a timed-out data to potential hackers.
Hope this helps :)

UTC offset from server to client

In our application we are Saving the UTC DateTime in DataBase. Client (javascript) is sending the datetime in Local TimeZone and at controller level we are converting it to UTC time before saving the date in Database.
Both the client and servers are on different timezones.
we are fetching date from database in UTC Using Entity Framework with
DateTime.SpecifyKind(_CreatedDate, DateTimeKind.Utc);
So should we again convert the DateTime to local DateTime at controller or should we handle all the DateTime conversion logic at the client.
When sending DateTime instances to the server conversion conversion to UTC should happen as early as possible. In this case by the client and as your client is javascript you can use the method toUTCString. If you are using momentjs you can use utc.
When receiving DateTime instances from the server conversion conversion to local time should happen as late as possible. Make sure that persisted dates/retrieved dates are in UTC when you create them. Again, it is the client that should be converting them to local date time instance.
Finally send all datetime instances between client and server using ISO8601 format. Momentjs, javascript's date object, json.net all can do this. This ensures nothing is lost and no cultural specific bugs are introduced.
As to why it should be handled at the client is very simple, its easiest to do it there. Only the client truly knows its timezone, this is usually very difficult to "guess accurately" on the server side. The only reason not to do this is if you wanted to store a users timezone info with their profile but even this can get very tricky (what happens if the user travels or if they move location, etc).
As to how to persist you can use either a DateTime type or a DateTime with offset type (the true type names depend on the RDBMs you are using). Which one you choose should depend on if it is important to know the offset from utc at the moment it was saved. So far I have not had a need to do this but maybe it is important for you. It has no influence on the actual point in time as a DateTime should represent the UTC point in time and with offset should represent the local time with offset to get back to the UTC point in time.
Here's the way we do it in our projects. In my opinion, you should be using datetimeoffset in your database. This allows you to be able to identify what timezone the date was saved in. Then, when you send your date from your client to your server, just make sure it's sent in datetimeoffset.
When you send the datetimeoffset from the server to the client, you can do the conversion on the client side. I don't think anybody would argue that MomentJS Timezone is the best library for this. Look over it and give it a shot.
http://momentjs.com/timezone/
Elaborating on DateTimeOffset
DateTimeOffset is another datatype like datetime except datetimeoffset adds an hour offset to determine the timezone. For instance, let's say you're in Central Timezone and you want to save the time 08:00 am. Well, in Datetimeoffset, it would be something like 08:00:00:00 -04:00 declaring that the offset was -4 (central timezone). This makes it easy because you don't have to do any math in your head when reading it and you really don't have to do any conversions (let MomentJS do it for you). When you read it, you will always know that "Oh, it was 08:00 am for whomever saved the time, and it looks like they saved it in Central timezone."
Since it's quite relative when is the "Proper" time to convert.
The only absolute rule i think is valid is this one.
UTC time is the only Real meaningful data
Any other conversion to any timezone is just a "Display" for me
So follow the same rules as you would with the rest of your data.
Like converting a Boolean to a Checkbox on the view.Or sending that checkbox value as Boolean to the server.
And that's the soonest it Reaches or Leaves the UI.

Universal DateTime Format

I'm working on an application where I'm sending datetime from JavaScript (client side) to a Web Service (server side). Now problem with DateTime is it has many formats and at any instance client might have a different format of DateTime than of server, which might break the parsing of datetime on server side.
I was thinking may be JavaScript's function "getTime()" will be an equivalent of C#'s datetime property "Ticks", so that I can sent getTime() from front end and can easily parse it to valid DateTime on server end. But unfortunately that doesn't seems to be the case :(
So is there any universal format that I can use for DateTime that would take my worries away of client's format being different and server responding with 500?
UPDATE
I can get into practice of sending "YYYY-MM-DD" or any other pre-defined format from front end and parse accordingly on back end, but it's viable only till someone misses it, and as a project gets bigger and more devs starts working on it, practices like this becomes overhead on management. So in short it is a work around but not a bull's eye solution. Thanks Mohit for bringing it up I forgot to mention.
I'd suggest the following:
Use JavaScript UTC clientside to send up to the server http://www.w3schools.com/jsref/jsref_utc.asp Or use a date format that cannot be confused (i.e. Long date or "yyyy-MM-dd")
On the server store the dates in UTC
When sending dates clientside send UTC dates to the client and use a JavaScript library like http://momentjs.com/ to render dates clientside in the client's time zone.
in my option , this is not pertain to time format or team convention or other something .
The real question is why you handle time with "String" , not "Date",
you get a Date object ,and turn it to String object , do some operation with string(what is boring and dangerous),and then turn it as Date() (or DateTime in C#) back .
string is string , time object is time object .
the only moment we do date=>string action is showing to end user , as possible as,we handle it by time object and use some stable tools to translating
for example: we have a dateTime object in c#,and we response it to client,
this is its format,the most standard format :
CreateTime: "/Date(-62135596800000)/"
and it will be translated as a Date object in js . with this , you don't need care UTC or local ,yyyy-MM-dd or yyyy/MM/dd . with some date lib , you can do anything to it as you want in a standard base line . after your all strange operation ,it is still a date object ,still a standard format,and transport it to service side ,it will be a DateTime object(still a standard format) in C# .
if you need get date from some other source like user input,
No matter what you want to do next,first and first translate it to a date object.

Asp-net web api output datetime with the letter T

the data in the DB look like this
2011-09-07 14:43:22.520
But my Web API outputs the data and replace the space with the letter T
2011-09-07T14:43:22.520
I can replace the letter T with a space again in jquery, but can I fix this problem from the Web API (make the web api output the original data?)
I also do not want the miliseconds at the end. How can I get rid of them?
The format of how you see the date in the database is usually irrelevant, because it should be passed into .Net as a DateTime - not as a string. (If you are storing it as a varchar in the database, you have a bigger problem.)
ASP.Net WebAPI is returning the value in format defined by ISO8601 and RFC3339. This is a good thing, as it is a recognized machine-readable format. You probably don't want to change it.
If you really want to change it, you would need to implement a custom JSON.Net JsonConverter, deriving from DateTimeConverterBase. This is discussed here and here.
But instead, you should consider how you are using the actual result in your client application. You mentioned jQuery, so I will assume your consumer is JavaScript. In many browsers, the ISO8601 value that you have is already recognized by the JavaScript Date constructor, so you might be able to just do this:
var dt = new Date("2011-09-07T14:43:22.520");
But this won't work in all browsers. And Date doesn't have a whole lot of flexibility when it comes to formatting. So instead, you might want to consider a library such as moment.js. With that in place, you can do this:
var m = moment("2011-09-07T14:43:22.520");
var s = m.format("YYYY-MM-DD HH:mm:ss"); // output: "2011-09-07 14:43:22"
Please note that the format string here conforms to moment.js, not to .NET. There are differences in case sensitivity. Please refer to the moment.js documentation for details.
One other thing - since the value you provided doesn't have either a Z at the end, nor does it have an offset such as -07:00, then I assume it came from a DateTime whos .Kind value is DateTimeKind.Unspecified. You should be aware that when this gets sent into JavaScript (or anywhere else for that matter), there is no information about what time zone is represented. JavaScript will assume the local time zone of the browser.
If that's not what you had intended, then you need to store UTC values in your database, and make sure they have DateTimeKind.Utc so they get serialized with a Z at the end. JavaScript will normalize this to the browser's time zone, but you will still be talking about the same moment in time.
Alternatively, you could use a DateTimeOffset type - which would serialize with the specific offset. JavaScript will still normalize this to the user's time zone.

Transferring javascript variables from client to server

I am programming a strange script that consists of transferring variables from client to a nodejs server.So if a have a date variable, how can I transfer it and use the same variable on the server?Is there any way to serialize objects and retrieve them on server side in a way that they remain the same type (date, function, variable, string, object...)?
Thank you
You can serialize a date by converting it to a number which can be sent via JSON.
new Date(+new Date)
is perfectly valid.
The prefix + in
+new Date
converts the newly created date to a number, and
new Date(myNumber)
reconstitutes a date from a number.
You might check out DNode in addition to nowjs. I've been watching both of those projects but not dabbled in them yet. However, I get the sense that DNode it is building more traction in the node.js community and I hear praise for it all the time.
https://github.com/substack/dnode
http://substack.net/posts/85e1bd/DNode-Asynchronous-Remote-Method-Invocation-for-Node-js-and-the-Browser
Timezones are very important in my application, so I've found that serializing dates to ISO8601 formatted strings for dates works best. #Mike's solution is great if you don't care about timezones, or can assume that all dates are UTC. There are plenty of javascript libraries to help serialize/deserialize ISO8601.
Now.js could abstract all of the serialisation, deserialisation.. it provides a shared namespace between node.js server and browser client:
http://nowjs.com/
As was posted before me, serialize the Date Object to a string literal, either the value in miliseconds or the formatted Date String.
Use a POST request passing the Date string in the request body or a GET requests passing the string via query parameter to get it to the server. There you may deserialize the string using the Date constructor.

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