Couple of Questions about Time Zones and Time Formats

bkonia · Post by **bkonia** » Sat Mar 17, 2007 11:00 pm

First question is, how do I set the timezone used by AwareIM? When I use the CURRENT_TIMESTAMP contant, the time it inserts is different from the system time on my server by one hour.

Second question. I'm using a TIMESTAMP field with the following format:

MM/dd/yy hh:mm

The problem is, the field doesn't seem to display or preserve AM/PM information. So whatever time is entered into that field gets converted to AM. For example, if I use CURRENT_TIMESTAMP, the field stores the time without the AM/PM info. Even if I use the calendar control and explicitly specify a PM time, it appears in the field without the PM suffix and is considered an AM time by the system.

aware_support · Post by **aware_support** » Mon Mar 19, 2007 8:19 am

We used to have the problem of one hour difference on XP - in our case the problem was solved by playing with the Daylight saving setting in the XP date/time dialog. Try to turn it on or off and see if it makes any difference.

To fix the second problem use the following format for date/time:

MM/dd/yy HH:mm

bkonia · Post by **bkonia** » Mon Mar 19, 2007 12:55 pm

I realize you can use HH:mm format, but then it displays time in 24 hr format. I want to get it to display 12 hr format, with the AM/PM suffix. This is the time format that most end users prefer in the U.S.

aware_support · Post by **aware_support** » Mon Mar 19, 2007 12:59 pm

In this case try using the following format:

MM/dd/yy hh:mm a

This should give you an AM/PM marker

bkonia · Post by **bkonia** » Fri Mar 23, 2007 6:01 pm

aware_support wrote:We used to have the problem of one hour difference on XP - in our case the problem was solved by playing with the Daylight saving setting in the XP date/time dialog. Try to turn it on or off and see if it makes any difference.

I could probably force it to be in sync, by disabling Daylight Savings Time and manually setting the time ahead by one hour. However, this is a workaround and not a very good one. If I set the time manually, I lose the ability to do automatic time synchronization in Windows.

I did some searching around on the Web and it seems the problem is due to the change in dates for Daylight Savings Time that went into effect this year. Apparently, upgrading to the latest JVM/JDK will resolve this issue. Please see the following article for further details:

http://blog.covalent.net/roller/covalent/entry/2

aware_support · Post by **aware_support** » Sat Mar 24, 2007 4:26 am

Thanks for this, Brad - highly appreciated. If you want you can download the recommended JDK and just replace the Aware IM JDK folder with the downloaded folder.

Aware IM has been tested with Java 1.5 and it will also work with all versions of 1.4, so the change will be safe. We will soon be releasing Aware IM with 1.5.