Way to get server timezone RESTfully?

mogoodrich · December 11, 2018, 7:55pm

Is there an easy way to fetch the current timezone the OpenMRS server is operating in RESTfully?

We want to alert the user when their client machine isn’t in the same timezone as the server.

If there’s no existing way, thoughts on adding this to the “session”? In the appointment scheduling module, we add the following two parameters to the model in our to perform this:

github.com

openmrs/openmrs-module-appointmentschedulingui/blob/master/omod/src/main/java/org/openmrs/module/appointmentschedulingui/fragment/controller/TimeZoneWarningFragmentController.java#L12




import java.util.Calendar;
import java.util.Date;
import java.util.TimeZone;


import org.openmrs.ui.framework.fragment.FragmentModel;


public class TimeZoneWarningFragmentController {


public void controller(FragmentModel model) {
    TimeZone tz = Calendar.getInstance().getTimeZone();
    model.addAttribute("serverTimeZone", tz.getDisplayName());
    model.addAttribute("serverTimeZoneOffset", tz.getOffset(new Date().getTime()) / 1000 / 60);
}


}

Any objections on adding this to the default rep of a session? Any other ideas?

Take care, Mark

mseaton · December 11, 2018, 8:55pm

I’m curious as to whether this issue is limited to just Timezones, or if this is just the most common manifestation. Wouldn’t you equally want an alert if the Timezones matched but the dates and times configured were vastly different - eg. if someone misconfigured or never configured the actual date/time on their server or client device?

Might an alternative be to just ask the server for the current datetime (in the form of timestamp in ms) and compare this to the current datetime on the client? Then you can make whatever decision you need to make based on how closely these match (eg. within a few minutes of each other is ok, but more than X time apart is not ok).