Structuring app with multiply time zones

Need help
1

Merry Christmas All!

I got stuck with multiply time zones in the app.

The key functionality of the app is that users (from different time zones) can create meeting proposals (that include date of meeting, topic, creator“s name and other information) that in turn will be displayed in a repeating group. Then another user (who likes time slot, topic and etc.) can confirm a meeting proposal. In other words, when a meeting proposal is created a new thing is created. And when somebody confirms a meeting proposal the thing is modified to include him/her.

Meeting entry contains following important fields: creator, partner, meeting“s date/time. To create a meeting proposal creator must choose date and time using date/time picker, then it should be somehow linked to his/her time zone and then be able to be displayed differently for users from various time zones. What is the best way to do this?

I was playing around letting users choosing their time zone manually so when a new thing is created date and time is saved firstly in user“s time zone and then converted to all other time zones (in other words, a thing has many columns utc-0, utc+1 and etc with corresponding date and time). But i haven“t understood how to filter meetings in repeating group based on «current date/time» function. For instance, I want to display only meetings that date and time is later than current moment but there are many date/time entries based on different time zones for one thing and i have no idea for which of them to create a constrain.

To conclude, there are following questions:
What is optimal concept of application with users from different time zones?
- How to structure data base?
- How to get user“s time zone?
- How to display date/time differently based on different time zones?:alarm_clock:

Thank you!

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Merry Christmas @ooh.alexander !

Did you try a custom format with “Users current time zone” ?

1 Like
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Thank you very much for this idea, @skylershelton!

I just tried to do that. “:formatted as” transforms date entry into text that can`t be further operated as date. But it is described here (Convert text to date) how text can be transformed into date format. So it should be fine.

But I got a new question. I read somewhere that date and time that can be seen in bubble data tab is just representation that is adjusted to my current time zone. So may be if a user from a time zone that is different from mine will create a date/time entry it will be adjusted to me automatically and i will see something different from what he initially typed in in data tab, is that right? So if yes, than it turns out to be unnecessary to manage timezones?

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Just tried going to my app from another device with different time zone and it turned out that bubble automatically adjusts date and time for a different time zone. :joy: so funny, spend almost a week on trying to understand how to do it manually and it turned out that bubble does it automatically

2 Likes
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Yea, many times the most obvious answer takes the longest to get at! KISS really is a skill! :laughing:

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