Want to fetch the current UTC-5 date

I have a case where users enter predictions about questions (e.g. “how likely will we go into a recession”). For every answer, I want to record the date so that I can display them on a chart. To do this, I need the date without the time, so I’m trying to zero out the hours / minutes / seconds and set them to midnight.

However, whenever I try to modify dates (either with Bubble’s built in functions or using date() related things with the javascript toolbox), I run into issues with users in different timezones creating records that have different datetimes.

For example, a user that triggers the workflow on the East Coast of the US will create a record that correctly zeroes out the hours/etc. to be “May 23rd, 12:00am.” But a user on the West Coast will create a record that is “May 23rd, 3:00am”. Clearly the workflow is setting the hours to zero but in their local timezone, so it’s a 3 hour offset to where I am and where I want it to be. I’m fairly certain this is because of how JS handles dates and times but I can’t figure out how to get around this.

For reference, after failing to find any success using out-of-the-box Bubble date/time functions, I tried using the JS Toolbox plugin with the below code to generate and store a date on page load. Then, when my workflow runs it stores this date on the record. I thought creating a string and setting it to the appropriate time zone would fix things, but I still get users who are logged in on the west coast storing dates that are off by 3 hours.

var myDate = new Date();
var pstDate = myDate.toLocaleString("en-US", {
  timeZone: "America/New_York", year:'numeric', month:'numeric', day:'numeric'
});

bubble_fn_jsdate(pstDate);

Hey Justin, the easiest thing to do is to use the plugin Browser Timezone and Locale (author Keith from GRUPZ). With this plugin you can retrieve the timezone, offset from UTC in minutes etc. from the user’s browser. This way you should be able calculate and save the UTC time using the +minutes option which is available when working with Bubble’s datetime field:

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