Exporting to ArcGIS Online Changes Time From Years to M/D/Y and Subtracts a Year

Question

Hello,

I have exported multiple time aware layers to ArcGIS Online. However, upon exporting, two things happen: first, my temporal data is given a month, date, year and time of day (12/31/1939 4:00PM, for example). Second, in the case that the actual year of the data is 1940, the exported time attribute associated with a feature loses a year (or maybe more accurately, 8 hours) to be 12/31/1939 4:00PM.

This *seems* to be happening in the export, but I wouldn't be surprised if there is something funky about my data, since I have done most of this work very ad-hoc and am not a GIS professional.

Any thoughts about where to look or what to try? Thanks!

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dzsiegel · Answer

Hi Brian--

Thanks for the response. This sounds like what is plaguing me, but I haven't quite figured out how to edit the formatting of my data.

The year fields are initially formatted in the shapefiles as numbers with six decimal places, but alas there is no datetime format as an option for my field. I must be looking in the wrong place?

Thanks!

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Brian_Wilson · Answer

DATETIME is a database format and it's stored internally as a number that includes hours minutes seconds...etc

If what you really want is just the year, you should store it as an integer, a SHORT would work.

In your computer it's probably in the local time zone and when you upload it, it is always assumed to be UTC so you are probably seeing a timezone shift.

If you switch to a SHORT there will be no conversion so it will fix this problem too.

Timezones are a pain. We could just use UTC globally, like they did in Isaac Asimov's "I, Robot" books. It would have ruined the ending of "Around the World in 80 Days" though.