New features to override timezones

@aj11 I’ll DM you to schedule a time this week to chat! Will also communicate to the rest of the product team to more clearly indicate that more experimental features will require clearer indication for feedback + potential discontinued status in the description.
@tylerboodman Here’s my response about parentheses! :slight_smile:

I will say reflecting on this second timezones experimental feature, we should’ve made it much more explicit that we were truly experimenting with this feature.

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If someone would explain to me what they need on the backend (vis-a-vis the deprecated experimental feature) that the Parallels SSA doesn’t do, I’d happily update it to fill the gap and put Parallels on sale.

The experimental Bubble date features basically filled the gap that Parallels was designed to address in the first place.

I was really gratified that Bubble (after what 2-3 years?) noticed that users needed a solution for what I call “parallel dates”. Now notice what I’ve said about array math and objects and client side workflows, por favor!

(Bubble people: I’m not upset about that. All of my plugins are basically just peeing on your shoes, saying, “look how easy this is to fix” as I wave a towel in your face.)

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I have the same impression…

If Bubble encourages us to upgrade, they should know that our apps, for now on, will be running with these “Experimental features” and we will be counting on it in our further features and deploys.

For me, “Experimental users” were the final line to validate the last details about the “Experimental features” in several “real world” cases.

Now, knowing that they can be removed, i don’t fell safe to test them out anymore…

I will freak out…

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Thankfully sounds like they are moving forward with the parenthesis feature (how did people survive without it for this long?)

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Hi Keith, maybe I don’t understand what your parallels plugin does. I looked at it previously, and didn’t seem relevant to my use cases.

There are two situations where I was using the override time zone feature, both in regard to backend API workflows.

The constant between these situations is that these backend workflows in my app can be triggered by both frontend and/or server-side activity. When triggered from the front end, the “API Requests Time Zone” is the local browser time zone of the user. When triggered from server-side, the “API Request’s Time Zone” is UTC.

Consequently, the time zone context of the workflow is unpredictable. It could be any of the local time zones of my users or UTC time.

Without any way of restricting/controlling the time zone, this causes chaos in two scenarios:

  1. When an API Connector Action runs, which includes date values without time zone information. Eg. “12/09/22 10:00PM”. Two different workflow runs, both receiving the same date in text above, can result in two different date values hours apart depending on whether the workflow was triggered by the front end or completely server-side.

  2. When you have a backend workflow that changes the hour of a date to a specific hour in a specific time zone using the “change hour to” operator. For example, I need to generate a date value that is equal to “tomorrow at 10am” in Eastern time. So I use the argument “Current date/time, +days: 1, change hours to 10”. Once again, without the override feature, this one argument can result in different date values based on what triggered the workflow (front-end or server-side).

These use cases could be addressed individually with specific features, but the core issue here is that Bubble does not (though it did for a hot second) allow us to tell an API workflow “use this specific time zone” every time.

It was a beautifully simple solution to a myriad of date-related problems, which is why it was so shocking to me when it was discontinued.

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Hey @aj11 - the main application of Parallels is to construct dates in an arbitrary Timezone.

And you can take some date, that is say Tuesday Dec 13 2022 at 3PM in PT and make Tuesday Dec 13 2022 at 3PM in ET (or any other arbitrary zone). It also just parses dates in ISO formats (or even completely custom formats) and can transform them in the same way.

The server side action included I there converts a single date but I could create a version that supports lists.

(This process of taking some date constructed in one zone and then holding its time parts “constant” but shifting the zone is what I call a “parallel date”, hence the name.)

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@grace.hong I’m so disappointed of deprecating the “Overriding timezones more broadly” experimental feature. As a Bubble coach and professional developer who works with clients across the world. My clients are in a need for such a feature. It’s really useful for apps that’s stores time sensitive data which may affect user’s decision making and compliance sometimes.

No one has contacted me or reached out to ask about feedback. I don’t know if the team can see which apps are using which features or not. But I believe this something you should add. and based on who’s using a feature you should reach out to them and get clear feedback specifically in a decision like that.

You have mentioned that you interviewed old and new users. What criteria did you use to select those users?, what kind of apps are they building?, how many user are using their apps? in how many time zones their users are located?

Please @grace.hong ask the team to reconsider the feature’s decision. It’s really important to have when we run apps across multiple time zones.

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I too need that feature as well. Hoping bubble could return it back.

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We need “overriding timezones more broadly” feature back

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How do you use parentheses? I tried it and thought it was worthless as I didn’t have control over where parentheses were placed, since it was automatic.

My intention to use it was for math functions to force order of operations which was not possible since the parentheses position was not controllable.

Interested to understand more about its usefulness for others.

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It auto places them but by clicking the More button inside different spots is how you control where your numbers go, in the picture I clicked on a More but there’s another one on the very outside
math

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Thanks for that.

Playing with it feels a bit cumbersome to get everything right where you’d want it. Would be so much better if we could just type in where we want it rather than having it be automatic.

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@grace.hong I’m not quite sure why the your development team removed it completely without a transition period where we have the option to keep the experimental feature rather than just remove it completely. As of now, we are having to audit our entire system that runs in the production tier as we have many users in many different timezones and were using an äbsolute setting for timezones to prevent issues with reporting, date selectors, etc. That the feature is just pulled like this without the ability to retain it when not on a dedicated server seems a little off to me. A solution if people find this feature confusing is to simply have them untick the box rather than pull the feature completely is my opinion. From a selfish perspective this is not what we needed just before Christmas, for goodness sake. We cannot even set the timezone of the page, as that feature is also gone, which would have saved us hours of dev time.

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Were you able to get on the calendar for an interview with @grace.hong? I had a great chat with her the other day, and we went over how useful this feature is for our app, but it sounds like you’re exposed to a larger variety of use cases and may be able to express its importance more clearly.

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@boston85719 That is definitely feedback you might want to submit to the parentheses team.

As @tylerboodman said, you can control where parenthesis are placed by using a different “more” to add the content, which is cumbersome but better than no control at all.

It would be nice to be able to move or place parentheses directly, but that would open up a whole can of worms with orphaned or mis-ordered parentheses, so I’m not sure if it’s viable.

Personally, I’m happy with how the feature works as is.

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I completely feel your pain here. From my understanding, adding back even the experimental feature simply isn’t possible until the next release version. With how many people are raising arms about this, I’m confident it will be returned, but that doesn’t fix your problem now.

In the meantime, check out the moment time zone plugin and @keith’s parallels plugin. These may provide some short-term workarounds for you.

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This is outrageous! Bring back the timezone setting feature! Why would you get rid of it? Entire applications depend on it!

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This is the most absurd and infuriating decision I have ever seen by a firm that REQUIRES that I trust them to run my business. We were only alerted to this once our reservation system began hemorrhaging duplicated. This is ruining our company over Christmas. I had made a full commitment to Bubble and frankly I feel stupid to have entrusted the business to a group that acts so arbitrarily and recklessly. I have lost all faith in Bubble.

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I just wanted to join the list of shocked users.
I had a very significant issue with dates manipulation in my app that I entirely solved with the timezone overriding feature, after weeks of trying.

I used it everywhere in my app from the time I discovered it, so it will now be very difficoult to track back all the changes I made. Also, I will need to figure out a new solution for my issue.

Please, please, we need to get that functionality back. I’ll not be able to upgrade to any new version until that.

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Hi all - apologies for the delayed response. We’re working on shaping this project out right now to release this to our users. I can’t provide an exact timeline due to other competing priorities, but we are aiming to bring it back :slight_smile:

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