Timezone Suggestion

Idea
1

Hello, please may I make a suggestion? Currently Bubble honours logged in user’s timezone when creating a thing (e.g an appointment). This is good, except when he/she happens to do that when traveling and on returning to home country, the appointment time will display the timezone of the country where it was created in. Why not have a checkbox somewhere in the workflow panes ‘ignore current user’s timezone’? This will give developers the flexibility to create zone agnostic times and save lots of time, no pun intended :slight_smile:

2

If you examine in more detail what is meant by an appointment, it is a co-ordinate system to place an event at a time and a place, for spacetime travelling like in Doctor Who.

When your tardis returns you to your home country, your place has changed, so if the appointment was to talk with someone in Hawaii, the local time of your call will need to change.

It sounds like you want to use the appointment as a “local reference time activity scheduler”, which typically means wearing a long scarf and walking a robotic dog at 6pm each evening.

Some alternatives I can think of to do this are:

  • Keep the date/time in a text format, and only convert it to the internal date/time type when needed, applying the current timezone offset.

  • Keep track of the timezone saved with every date/time. When it differs from the current timezone, remove the previous timezone offset and apply the new one. This would need to happen for all date/times in the schedule - past as well if planning on travelling backwards in time, like a trip down memory lane.

  • Assign a “home” timezone, and align all date/times to that one. It’d help the UI to show which timezone it is for.

2 Likes
3

Thanks Mishav. All of what you say is correct and agree that should be the default behaviour. Your third suggestion will help my issue (which is that an appointment I made on the app whilst abroad, at a time relevant to home country, had shifted to foreign country’s time when I returned to the home country - so effectively computer’s timezone was being saved, whilst there was no need to).

Although the third suggestion helps, I still think there is a need for Bubble to have a simple way to ignore timezone programmatically.