idea Enable local time formatting of UTC date/time data in ArcGIS Pro Ideas

Enable local time formatting of UTC date/time data

AJR — Mon, 19 Feb 2024 20:01:04 GMT

It would be nice if ArcGIS Pro had a feature that allowed for the display of data stored in UTC time to be displayed in local time. For fields (i.e. editor tracking) that are stored as UTC, having to manually do the timezone, conversion is a pain. A way to tell ArcGIS Pro to display the UTC date/time as local time (from the machine that AGP is running on) should be relatively easy to implement but would be extremely helpful.

Re: Enable local time formatting of UTC date/time data - Status changed to: Needs Clarification

TanuHoque — Thu, 06 Jan 2022 01:33:50 GMT

@AJR

Unfortunately Pro doesn't allow you to choose any time zone at this point. That said, we introduced a new concept in services i.e. Preferred time zone. When the preferred time zone metadata is available for a service, Pro shows date/times in that time zone.

please see more information here:
https://www.esri.com/arcgis-blog/products/arcgis-pro/mapping/working-with-agol-feature-services-date-time-attributes-in-non-utc-time-zone-in-arcgis-pro-2-7/

https://pro.arcgis.com/en/pro-app/latest/help/data/services/use-web-feature-layers.htm#ESRI_SECTION1_9EC2834147564F93B442B30975039010

https://enterprise.arcgis.com/en/server/10.9/publish-services/windows/edit-map-service-settings.htm#LI_63693B19FCF94FCE863CB8F60FEBA712

and finally a video for a tech session from last UC on this topic
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esb8X-1TtPk

Re: Enable local time formatting of UTC date/time data

AJR — Thu, 06 Jan 2022 16:06:11 GMT

Thanks, but the preferred time zone stuff doesn't help when accessing local geodatabase data. This idea request is for the enhancement of AGP to allow for enabling/disabling the formatting/display of data stored in one time zone (i.e. UTC) to be displayed in local time.

Re: Enable local time formatting of UTC date/time data

KoryKramer — Wed, 12 Jan 2022 21:23:02 GMT

Hi @AJR thanks for the clarification. I guess to add a question, for the Editor Tracking example that you cite in the idea's original description, is there a reason that you are storing those times in UTC if you are not using services, rather than storing in database time? Is the database time not your local time?

See the How times are recorded section of the editor tracking help.

Do you have other fields (i.e. not editor tracking fields) that you store in UTC but need to view in local time? If so, what is the business reason to store them in UTC if just used locally?

Thanks for any additional info about your use case that you can provide!

Re: Enable local time formatting of UTC date/time data

AJR — Wed, 12 Jan 2022 21:34:23 GMT

Yes, I do have other fields that are recorded in UTC that aren't the editor tracking fields. This is fairly common for data that's edited by users who are spread across multiple time zones. All data is stored as UTC and then displayed as appropriate to the user in their local time zone. This would apply to whether the data is stored as UTC or database time and want the time to be displayed in their local timezone (which can be something other than database time for folks working remotely).

Thanks!

A.J.

Re: Enable local time formatting of UTC date/time data

TanuHoque — Thu, 13 Jan 2022 00:12:14 GMT

Thanks, but the preferred time zone stuff doesn't help when accessing local geodatabase data. This idea request is for the enhancement of AGP to allow for enabling/disabling the formatting/display of data stored in one time zone (i.e. UTC) to be displayed in local time.

Thanks @AJR for the clarification. Sorry that I was thinking your suggestions in context of service layer, not while consuming enterprise dataset directly in ArcGIS Pro.

Re: Enable local time formatting of UTC date/time data - Status changed to: Open

KoryKramer — Fri, 14 Jan 2022 16:15:45 GMT

Thanks, A.J.

For your work, have you thought about where it would make sense to have such a setting? That is, at the application level, project, map, or layer? Just wondering. We have the idea back open. Thank you for the additional details!

Re: Enable local time formatting of UTC date/time data

AJR — Fri, 14 Jan 2022 16:25:35 GMT

I'm not sure where makes the most sense in terms of the level of development effort required, but from a user perspective, I think it makes sense to have the setting at the layer level. If the date/time field supported storing the timezone with the data (which it doesn't as far as I know) having it as an application-level checkbox for "display dates/times in local timezone" would be awesome. However, since AGP doesn't "know" about the timezone that the data is stored in, it probably makes sense to have this be a layer option where the timezone of the field is defined and then there's an option to display the data in local time (or maybe any timezone if the developers wanted to get really fancy).

Re: Enable local time formatting of UTC date/time data

Anonymous User — Tue, 17 May 2022 19:20:49 GMT

Love the idea, just had the idea myself today - after adjusting the feature services preferred time zone and being able to see that in Pro - would be nice to have that available for the data itself in ArcGIS Pro. This would be very useful for the reasons @AJR states. Thanks.

Re: Enable local time formatting of UTC date/time data

TanuHoque — Tue, 17 May 2022 23:11:29 GMT

@AJR, @Anonymous User

Thanks for you inputs. Please keep adding your requirements and use cases here.

If the date/time field supported storing the timezone with the data (which it doesn't as far as I know)

There are some databases that support storing timezone offset. We are thinking of supporting that in near-term (I'm not making any promises though 😛 ).

Re: Enable local time formatting of UTC date/time data

WalkerHenry__NIFCAdmin — Tue, 25 Apr 2023 22:43:04 GMT

Hi @KoryKramer, @TanuHoque,

Would love to see this functionality for wildfire GIS, both the display and input of date fields.

Sounds like our use case is similar, but with a hosted service.
We have users editing a national service in both Pro and Web/Mobile Apps and the difference in reading/entering dates in each causes confusion.

Setting a preferred time zone doesn't work for us because end users span all US time zones, but most all users want to be able to input dates in the local time through Pro.

For our use case, I'd prefer to see the conversion to local time in Pro as the default behavior for any hosted feature services.

Thanks,
Walker

Re: Enable local time formatting of UTC date/time data

TanuHoque — Wed, 26 Apr 2023 00:25:54 GMT

Thanks @WalkerHenry__NIFCAdmin for adding your use cases.

Just to make sure I understand your workflow correctly...

to keep it simple, let's say you have two users. UserA is from Denver, CO and UserB from Portland, ME. They are adding two separate incidents within their Pro sessions. Both incidents happened exactly at 12:30pm on 4/21/2023 in their respective local time (aka wall clock time) - even though they happened 2 hrs apart.

I assume by "most all users want to be able to input dates in the local time through Pro", you were suggesting that in the above case both UserA and UserB will enter the same value i.e. "4/21/2023 12:30 pm". Since UserA is CO (that is in Mountain time zone) and UserB is in ME (in the Eastern time zone), Pro will apply the correct time difference while storing them.

Please let me know if I didn't understand your workflow.

Re: Enable local time formatting of UTC date/time data

WalkerHenry__NIFCAdmin — Wed, 26 Apr 2023 15:25:54 GMT

@TanuHoque ,

Exactly.

And when each viewed the other's record, it would show +/- 2 hours from their own.
Matching the behavior seen in AGOL.

Thanks,
Walker

Re: Enable local time formatting of UTC date/time data

GIS_Spellblade — Thu, 15 Feb 2024 16:36:34 GMT

I'd like to hop onto this idea as well. We have a similar business use-case; we keep our primary data is in UTC, per company policy, but when users input dates into our data they are not expecting to have to compensate for the UTC conversion.

This crops up in the following ways, a user will input the date an asset was created (yyyy/mm/dd) and due to their timezone differential, the asset appears to be created the previous day. This is relatively easy to compensate for in a web application through utilizing Arcade and the ToLocal() function for display. On desktop the workaround is a bit more cumbersome and would require one of the following:

a field calculate snippet for desktop users
an attribute rule per featureclass with manually entered dates
a constant sticky-note to remind them of their time difference

All of the above options are unsavory and require varying amounts of overhead to create and maintain; hence, a software setting that abstracts this away from the user (and the program administrators) would be ideal. This would be a huge quality of life improvement for those in our organization that are responsible for data entry who are normally not the same individuals who are proficient in programming datetime conversions.

Re: Enable local time formatting of UTC date/time data

TanuHoque — Thu, 15 Feb 2024 18:59:30 GMT

first, my apologies to @WalkerHenry__NIFCAdmin for not replying before. Somehow it fell thru the cracks.

I'm not sure if you tried this yet, we made a big enhancement to make working with date/time in Pro 3.2 and Enterprise 11.2.

Please try the new field type named esriFieldTypeTimestampOffset. That should work for your workflow

@GIS_Spellblade

pls give esriFieldTypeTimestampoffset field type a try and let us know if that doesn't work for your use case.

I'm more than happy to answer questions regarding these new field types here.

thanks

Re: Enable local time formatting of UTC date/time data

WalkerHenry__NIFCAdmin — Wed, 21 Feb 2024 00:16:40 GMT

Thanks @TanuHoque ,

I'm anticipating the new Timestamp Offset field to meet our needs perfectly and looking forward to the Date Only field as well.

However, we need them to be implemented across Pro, AGOL, and Field Maps before we can begin any use.
Our primary editing service follows an annual cadence. Fingers crossed for 2025.

Thanks

Re: Enable local time formatting of UTC date/time data

TanuHoque — Wed, 21 Feb 2024 00:32:29 GMT

@WalkerHenry__NIFCAdmin

I'm glad to know that.

Pro and AGOL support these new field types. That said, the FS sync workflow (which I believe is critical for your workflow) doesn't support this yet. My understanding is that supporting these field types by both sync workflow and Field Map app is the road map for the near term.

Adding some blogs posted related to these new field types for users who will read this thread in the future.

Re: Enable local time formatting of UTC date/time data

GIS_Spellblade — Thu, 22 Feb 2024 17:57:09 GMT

I'm not sure that this solves the use-case for us. We're noticing discrepancies between the time as provided in the Editor Tracking fields vs. the manually entered fields. It is possible for us to update all of our manually entered fields but that's a bit of a lift across our entire infrastructure.

Additionally, when we're serving this data out in a web application, it seems the pop-ups are aware of the client's local time and automatically casting our UTC dates to those times (even though the service settings are set to UTC and display in UTC) which is throwing everything off. Our expectation here is that the web pop-ups would display the time as recorded within our database.

Re: Enable local time formatting of UTC date/time data

TanuHoque — Mon, 26 Feb 2024 06:37:32 GMT

@GIS_Spellblade

Our expectation here is that the web pop-ups would display the time as recorded within our database

with recent enhancements in web app such as new Map Viewer and Experience Builder, you can set your webmap's time zone to view data in a particular time zone. By default and the way it was before is that web apps always show date/time values in your device local time zone.

ArcGIS Pro, starting either at 2.8 or 2.9, displays date/time in preferred time zone set to the service level. If there are no preferred time zone or you are using Pro version older than 2.8, you will see date/time showing up in UTC.

One option you can try for now is what we call unknown time zone. If you set your service's time zone to unknown, your date/time values will be passed around and displayed as-is.

you might find these two blogs helpful

ArcGIS Online Map Viewer supports date-time data off multiple time zones in a single layer (esri.com)

Working with Online feature service date-time attributes in non-UTC time zones in ArcGIS Pro (esri.com)

Re: Enable local time formatting of UTC date/time data

GIS_Spellblade — Thu, 21 Mar 2024 16:38:18 GMT

@TanuHoque, is there an Idea open for collecting Editor Tracking Information with the new UTC + TimeZone Enabled field instead of the UTC or database time?