topic Re: ArcGIS Online Time Zone - Over-ride UTC default? in ArcGIS Online Questions

ArcGIS Online Time Zone - Over-ride UTC default?

AllenScully — Thu, 21 Jul 2016 21:34:58 GMT

Any way to get ArcGIS Online to stop using UTC and use your organizations local time?

We have several maps in AGOL that use a filter on a date/time field, displaying incidents for a specific day. However, records for a given day (July 20 for example) actually show up as July 19 in AGOL, with no records returned, even though there were in fact incidents on the 20th.

We are not able to modify the date properties in ArcMap or database side of things as far as time zone changes. It is and has to remain in our local time.

I understand why AGO does this, but it drives me crazy and would love it if someone had a workaround they could share. Hopefully it's easy/obvious and I have just missed it.

Thanks -

Allen

Re: ArcGIS Online Time Zone - Over-ride UTC default?

DanPatterson_Retired — Tue, 22 Jun 2021 08:36:14 GMT

several ideas out there but I don't know if they were resolved https://community.esri.com/ideas/6934

especially since it says UTC must be entered in tables, implying you would have to do a calculation to your time Work with fields—ArcGIS Online Help | ArcGIS

and then there is this big list of time issues in the Maps section of this link Troubleshoot—ArcGIS Online Help | ArcGIS

which you might want to peruse to see if there is an acceptable workaround

Re: ArcGIS Online Time Zone - Over-ride UTC default?

KellyGerrow — Mon, 25 Jul 2016 22:36:43 GMT

Thanks for the great resources Dan!

Allen,

As mentioned in the documentation, it is a best practice to publish your data to ArcGIS Online in UTC time. You can set a time zone on up to two fields when publishing from ArcMap and you can select a timezone when publishing from a CSV.

Can you describe why you are unable to modify the date and time? Is it a technology limitation or a data policy? Either way, I'd like to learn a little more about your workflow if possible.

Thanks,

Kelly

Re: ArcGIS Online Time Zone - Over-ride UTC default?

deleted-user-E_3mB_cypJsq — Tue, 27 Sep 2016 18:43:50 GMT

I can't speak for everyone, but even if we could modify our dates and times, we wouldn't want to. We store our dates and times in our local time. Everything we do, business wise, is done in our local time. It would be a huge inconvenience to store all of our data in a time zone that we will never use and never require. I understand this from a global perspective, especially when AGOL is designed to allow the sharing of data, but then allow us to define the timezone on the service as a whole, not 1 or 2 columns.

Re: ArcGIS Online Time Zone - Over-ride UTC default?

KellyGerrow — Fri, 30 Sep 2016 16:19:51 GMT

Hi Paul,

Thank you for the feedback! Where do you store your data and how do you typically publish your data? Through ArcMap, Pro or ArcGIS Online?

-Kelly

Re: ArcGIS Online Time Zone - Over-ride UTC default?

deleted-user-E_3mB_cypJsq — Fri, 30 Sep 2016 19:07:53 GMT

Our GIS data is stored in an Oracle Geodatabase. However, we do integrate with SQL Server non-spatial databases as well. We typically publish our data using ArcMap and create maps and apps on AGOL using map services from our external ArcGIS Server. Occasionally we store the data in AGOL as well.

Re: ArcGIS Online Time Zone - Over-ride UTC default?

JasonFitzsimmons — Mon, 13 Aug 2018 18:47:13 GMT

I'd like to add my two cents here, and say that ESRI should definitely provide a better option to show local time in ArcGIS Online. There are 122 votes to change this feature in the link above. Why would anyone creating apps for a localized use (as in practically any municipal government) want to display anything other than local time in their apps? The ability to enable only two fields for local time is simply not sufficient for anyone creating apps that use multiple date fields.

Re: ArcGIS Online Time Zone - Over-ride UTC default?

KellyGerrow — Wed, 22 Aug 2018 18:24:37 GMT

Hi Jason,

There have been improvements made to setting local time for all fields during the publishing process. Check out this blog for best practices with time data.

https://www.esri.com/arcgis-blog/products/arcgis-enterprise/sharing-collaboration/mastering-the-space-time-continuum-con…

-Kelly

Re: ArcGIS Online Time Zone - Over-ride UTC default?

JasonFitzsimmons — Thu, 23 Aug 2018 19:33:44 GMT

thanks--the main point I see in that link that might apply to use (in Rule #2) won't work, as we don't generally use hosted data, we keep our data on premise and publish services from our own servers (so no dropdown menu option to set time zone)...unless I missed something?

Re: ArcGIS Online Time Zone - Over-ride UTC default?

KellyGerrow — Mon, 27 Aug 2018 21:47:58 GMT

Thanks Jason,

There are solution in the publishing process for hosted services in ArcGIS Online and ArcGIS Enterprise to set the timezone. If you are using data collected in a local time zone with ArcGIS Server, I'd suggest creating a tool that converts local time to UTC prior to publishing if you have than two fields.

We are working on some projects for setting a specific timezone for some applications. That being said, time can be incredibly confusing when people from varying timezone and experiences may be viewing your data, especially with public maps. Currently, using UTC as a standard time and converting to local timezone is a consistent way to share date and time information with users without requiring the users to perform time conversions. I'd like to know more about you specific project to understand your needs further.

Is the map that you are creating only accessible to some users who are all in the same timezone or is it also accessible to the public? If someone in a different timezone was viewing your data, what would be the best way for them to understand the timezone of the original data vs. the timezone that they are reading in the map? Should this be defined by the map creator or the map reader?

Thanks for your feedback,

-Kelly

Re: ArcGIS Online Time Zone - Over-ride UTC default?

JasonFitzsimmons — Wed, 05 Sep 2018 17:57:39 GMT

I work for municipal (city) government, so all of our internal apps (which is what most of our AGOL apps as for) are used in one single time zone. Our public apps are also entirely based in one time zone, and our clients and customers are the people of this city (although we do not have this issue with time conversion when creating custom apps using the JS API and ArcGIS Server). Local time is very important for our internal apps as most of them are for inspectors and planners; especially when the UTC time will actually change the date as well.

Also, because we often deal with issues such as traffic incidents, the local time is important: for example, I work on one custom app that shows the time of traffic crashes (in local time). Displaying these times in UTC would completely misrepresent the data and render it useless for planners that need to know when crash occurrences are highest (to mention one use of time related data, for us). Moreover, our internal apps have legal and financial implications, and are used for scheduling work.

I understand that using UTC time zone for some public maps can makes sense in some cases. I don't really understand why there isn't an option for easily switching this for AGOL apps (whether using hosted and locally hosted data). I know if I am looking at a map of time-based events from California, I would still rather see the local California times displayed, as that is the time reference for the citizens involved in that local event.

Re: ArcGIS Online Time Zone - Over-ride UTC default?

OdiriOyaide — Fri, 21 Sep 2018 22:45:28 GMT

Only way I've found around the problem of AGOL not accepting anything but UTC from your non-hosted services is to:

- go to the pop up configuration for the layer in your web map

- Add Attribute expression

- for the expression, pick the function ToLocal in the functions tab, and in the brackets put your time field from the globals tab. eg my time field is Last_Position, so the expression is ToLocal($feature["Last_Position"])

- Edit the name of the expression if you like to something other than Custom

- once you click OK, you'll have access to this new attribute in the fields available to you. configure your pop-up to show this field and you'll get your time converted to your local timezone.

Although this works, I'd like to say that it's been a real pain (you know where) to do this for every time field in every layer (we have an AVL map service. say no more...) so please come up with a solution where AGOL accepts the Data Field Setting in the map service. Pleeeeease!!!

Re: ArcGIS Online Time Zone - Over-ride UTC default?

OdiriOyaide — Fri, 21 Sep 2018 22:51:34 GMT

I work for a municipality too mate, feel your pain. tried responding to your thread but posted to the main one.

Only way I've found around the problem of AGOL not accepting anything but UTC from your non-hosted services is to:

- go to the pop up configuration for the layer in your web map

- Add Attribute expression

- Edit the name of the expression if you like to something other than Custom

- once you click OK, you'll have access to this new attribute in the fields available to you. configure your pop-up to show this field and you'll get your time converted to your local timezone.

I'll repeat my original plea for AGOL to accept the Data Field Setting in the map services.

Re: ArcGIS Online Time Zone - Over-ride UTC default?

PaulLohr — Wed, 19 Dec 2018 21:59:31 GMT

We use ArcGIS Server with the ArcGIS Online Map Viewer.

Date / time fields which aren't the specified time field (in the map document) are adjusted by the AGOL Map Viewer by adding 4 or 5 hours to the time (depending on DST or not). There is no way of specifying the time zone so of course the time is wrong after the 4 or 5 hours is added to the time.

The date / time functionality in the ArcGIS Online Map Viewer really needs some work.

Re: ArcGIS Online Time Zone - Over-ride UTC default?

KaraUtter — Mon, 07 Jan 2019 23:11:05 GMT

When I am publishing from ArcGIS Desktop, I don't have the option to choose a time-zone.

When I add a custom attribute expression as outline above, it does not allow me to format how it displays, so instead of "1/19/2019" - which is easy for the public to quickly read - it says, "Fri Jan 18 2019 17:00:00 GMT-0700 (Mountain Standard Time)" which is way too long and not quickly interpreted which defeats the purpose of easy to view online apps.

Re: ArcGIS Online Time Zone - Over-ride UTC default?

OdiriOyaide — Tue, 08 Jan 2019 18:16:25 GMT

Hi Kara,

you can choose the timezone in your mxd. if you choose your layer and go to the time tab. you might be able to change the date format there too.

Re: ArcGIS Online Time Zone - Over-ride UTC default?

KimberlyParker — Wed, 06 Mar 2019 15:11:36 GMT

Hi Kelly,

Can ESRI put out a step by step with screenshots of where this option is to set time zone when publishing a feature service? It says there's a way to do it but it does not show you how. The instructions (see link below) say "When you publish feature layers containing date fields from files or an ArcGIS Desktop app, specify whether the date values are in the local time zone or in UTC time. If the date fields contain local time zone information, you must specify this when you publish the layer." However, I don't see anywhere to do this in the Service Editor settings when publishing a feature service.

Work with date fields—ArcGIS Online Help | ArcGIS

I have also tried following another set of instructions for changing the time setting in the feature service in the web map per this website, again the settings it states are there are not present. I've spent 2 hours trying to correct this issue for our end user so far this morning and have still not come up with a solution.

I also vote for ESRI changing to keep the exact dates as they are in the date field when publishing a service. For our uses, the date the data is collected is what our users are looking for and they are not happy with the fact that the dates automatically change- on the back end we didn't even know ArcGIS online would automatically change it until we found the discrepancy- it's just not something I would have even known to look for when simply publishing an attribute table that happened to have a date field let alone have to do several steps to work around for numerous field datasets that have been collected and published as several feature service impacting several maps and applications. Perhaps on paper ESRI has their reasons, but for day to day users it just doesn't make sense for the majority of us. If there was a clear button or option to select time zone, I can see that would be a solution, unfortunately I still haven't been able to find it.

Thanks,

Kendra

Re: ArcGIS Online Time Zone - Over-ride UTC default?

KellyGerrow — Mon, 11 Mar 2019 18:51:41 GMT

Hi Kimberly,

Here is a blog that outlines this process in ArcGIS Pro:

Mastering the Space Time Continuum: Considerations for Publishing Date Fields to the Web

Here is the documentation about how to do this in ArcMap:

Why set a temporal reference—Help | ArcGIS Desktop

Thanks,

Kelly

Re: ArcGIS Online Time Zone - Over-ride UTC default?

DanielOliva — Wed, 19 Jun 2019 18:27:20 GMT

When I click on the Mastering the Space Time Continuum blog it's blank. Any idea what's wrong?

Thanks

Re: ArcGIS Online Time Zone - Over-ride UTC default?

KellyGerrow — Wed, 19 Jun 2019 19:13:58 GMT

Unfortunately something happened with out blog system and the content was deleted. We are still looking into the cause, but a copy of the blog can be found on geonet https://community.esri.com/community/gis/web-gis/arcgisonline/blog/2017/06/23/golden-rules-to-mastering-space-and-time-on-the-web?sr=search&searchId=322594c6-cf77-43c3-a541-7b568930fcf0&searchIndex=0‌

Let me know if that blog helps.

Thanks,

Kelly