Hey @mseaton and @mogoodrich,
So we have been running into issues with timezones and HFE. Actually we have been running into issues with timezones and the Ref App in general, but for the sake of concision I’ll focus on HFE only here.
In a nutshell the core issue is that the code is written in a way that assumes that client and server are on the same timezone, which is indeed a valid assumption for local deployments (most likely accounting for 99% of the installations count out there.)
One starts running into issues when 1) client and server are on different timezones and 2) date-times come into play. What I mean is that this is only relevant for actual timestamps type of data: visit start and end date-times, encounter date-times, obs date-times, … etc. This is largely irrelevant for simple dates where the time component doesn’t matter, or for times that are disassociated from a date (cfr TimeWidget
).
We would like to start to introduce the possibility to switch on (through a new GP) the following rule: client and server to exchange date-times in UTC.
The consequence of this is that both client code and server code need to convert to/from UTC in a number of places, and it’s quite a hunt to identify those views and controllers. For now we have been focusing on encounter dates through HTML-755.
This new rule will be optional for backward compatibility reasons, but I wonder if you had any thoughts on this before we start actively submitting PRs in that direction?
Cc @jfigueiredo