ArcGIS Online Time Zone - Over-ride UTC default?

[AllenScully]

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

[JasonFitzsimmons]

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. 

[OdiriOyaide]

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

- 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.

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

[KimberlyParker]

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

[KellyGerrow]

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

[DanielOliva]

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

Thanks

[KellyGerrow]

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-master...‌

Let me know if that blog helps.

Thanks,

Kelly 

[DanielOliva]

Hello,

My coworker found this article: 

https://support.esri.com/en/technical-article/000015224

We used the instructions to change the service properties so that the Time Zone is set to our local time. This fixed our issue. Thanks.

[Anonymous User]

I have a dashboard that is displaying dates incorrectly. I set the time zone on the layer and republished. The times showed up correctly, but the series chart widget quit working. I can select parameters (site, chemical, time-frame) once, get a chart, and from then on the chart fails. I get "Cannot Access Data" errors every subsequent effort.

When I turn time off in the layer, the chart works, but times are off by 7 hours.

I have tried many different things. I've turned time off on the layer and set the zone when publishing - same thing.

I have turned off time on the layer and and resorted to the default of "none" (UTC) for time. 

My charts work now but I am stuck with times that are off by 7 hours.

Is this a problem with ArcGIS Pro? I've heard of people getting it to work by making the time adjustment in ArcMap.

Thank you,

Randy McGregor

[JasonFitzsimmons]

Hi, you can find info on how to set the map service here (using Manager or Administrator )  https://support.esri.com/en/technical-article/000015224
This worked for me.

[Michael_Knapp]

Hi Kelly -

We are using ESRI for our master burial list and running into issues with the auto-time conversion.  We  need to be able to control whether or not the date gets auto - converted.  In our case the data is in SQL and is being editing using portal app.  The date picker appears to be converting the editing to UTC time which changes the date of burial in the underlying database.

We would like to opt out of the auto conversion to UTC time as in situations of recording an event occurring on a certain date (such as a birth or a death) the solution of having this auto conversion degrades our ability to accurately record data.

Thank you,

Tina