Time zone resetting to UTC when doing an overwrite of a hosted table.

JasonSheldon

When uploading a spreadsheet to a hosted table, the initial load lets you choose a timezone (in my case US Central Time). 

When performing an Update -> choosing the Overwrite Entire Layer option, the time zone reverts to UTC.  This causes all dates to shift by one day (in my case since I'm US Central).

Is there any way to overwrite the time zone after the hosted table is created?

Thanks!

Jason

Anonymous User

Hi Jason Sheldon‌,

Thanks for the post. We have received a couple reports of this in Esri Support and have recently logged a usability issue for it. ArcGIS Online will always store dates in UTC 0 and calculates the offset when the time zone box is checked so that the dates display in local time (your browser converts the date from UTC to local for display). Of course when overwriting/appending that time zone box isn't there, which is what we're looking at. 

I think the best option is to convert the time from local to UTC in the spreadsheet beforehand. For example since you are Central Time (UTC -5 in Daylight Savings), if you have 5/22/2020 6:00 p.m. in the spreadsheet convert it to 5/22/2020 11:00 p.m. before upload. There are multiple options for this workflow in Excel. 

If you have ArcGIS Pro, you can calculate the field using an Arcade Expression:

<SPAN class="keyword token">var</SPAN> startDate <SPAN class="operator token">=</SPAN> <SPAN class="punctuation token">(</SPAN>$feature<SPAN class="punctuation token">.</SPAN>date_field<SPAN class="punctuation token">)</SPAN><SPAN class="punctuation token">;</SPAN>
<SPAN class="keyword token">var</SPAN> newDate <SPAN class="operator token">=</SPAN> <SPAN class="token function">dateAdd</SPAN><SPAN class="punctuation token">(</SPAN>StartDate<SPAN class="punctuation token">,</SPAN> <SPAN class="number token">5</SPAN><SPAN class="punctuation token">,</SPAN> <SPAN class="string token">'hours'</SPAN><SPAN class="punctuation token">)</SPAN><SPAN class="punctuation token">;</SPAN>
<SPAN class="keyword token">return</SPAN> newDate<SPAN class="line-numbers-rows"><SPAN>‍</SPAN><SPAN>‍</SPAN><SPAN>‍</SPAN></SPAN>

Hope this helps - please send me a direct message or email pklingman@esri.com with your customer number and I can help get a support case going or attach your customer number to the issue. 

-Peter