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Showing TimeZone for UX - Daylight Savings Time Offset collision issues

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Posted on by JTMechkowski

I was asked as a part of user experience to add the shortened Time Zone to date/timestamps. After reviewing the Text function, it seems as if none of these display time zone abbreviations. Researching I came across an article that shows how to do this manually using collections. This seems fairly smart at first, however after looking over it, this will lead to collision issues. This is especially noticeable now as US DST ends 11/6. This is noticeable in answers such as Solved: How to check if DST (Daylight Saving Time) is in e... - Power Platform Community (microsoft.com)

The Time Zone UX requirement is because users will be working with others in different Time Zones. While it's nice that times are always displayed in the current user's Time Zone, not having an indicator could lead to confusion of if an action that is timestamped is in the current user's time or the user who performed the action that created the timestamp.

Is there any way to either:

A: Show Time Zone labels easily
B: Discern correctly a user is on Daylight Savings time

Thank you for your time.

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Building Power Apps

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RandyHayes 76,299 Super User 2024 Season 1 on at

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@JTMechkowski

There are some assumptions to be made!

You can determine the DST by doing a time zone offset on a known DST or Non-DST date/time. For example, Jan 1 at 12:00 am would give you a non-DST offset. From that, you can then know the offset and can use the table (don't bother with a collection) method to establish your time zone. THEN, based on that, you can determine if the current date/time is DST or not.

However, the assumptions come because there are some places that do not observe DST...so that is the wrench in the works!

Hopefully that makes sense and is helpful for you.

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JTMechkowski 17 on at

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I'm not particularly excited by this but it makes a lot of sense, thank you for your insight! Additionally, Thanks for the recommendation of using a table instead of a collection. As static data it definitely makes more sense than shoving collection bloat into some on<x> property.

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RandyHayes 76,299 Super User 2024 Season 1 on at

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@JTMechkowski

Yes, this is the only combo of options that I've found to be successful. The only factor that has always been a thorn is the areas that do not observe DST.

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leonsig93 229 on at

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Thanks for this! Been stuck on how to ID the different time zones while accounting for daylight savings. Thankfully all my zones observe it.

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