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Option to show time in local time when data has a time zone defined

488
3
08-22-2025 08:16 AM
Status: Open
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Joshua-Young
by
Honored Contributor

ArcGIS Pro needs product wide support for displaying time in local time when the data has a time zone defined. I have no problem with time being stored in UTC by default, but my users need to interact with that time in local time. Currently in ArcGIS Online our time is stored in UTC and when my users view or edit the time they are working with local time and the software handles converting the time zones. I know about the Preferred Time Zone setting, but for services from ArcGIS Solutions I cannot turn that on. Plus doing that way seems rather limiting. I would think having the clients handle what time zone to show the data in is more flexible.

In ArcGIS Pro we are only shown UTC time and have to remember to edit in UTC time. ArcGIS Pro needs the ability to see what time zone the data is in and then display the time to the user in local time and allow the user to edit using local time. Then ArcGIS Pro handles the time zone conversions on the backend just like ArcGIS Online does.

I was asked to create a road closure map for an event and we use the road closure solution from Esri. I got the layout setup in ArcGIS Pro but when I added a table frame all the closure times are in UTC. I can find no way to have the table show the times in local time. I went back to the web app that was used to enter the road closures and all the times are "correct" (local time).

3 Comments
EmilyGeo
by Esri Regular Contributor
‎08-22-2025 09:20 AM

Thanks for sharing your idea. Managing date and time data can indeed be tricky. We've recently added some new field types that might help, including: 

  • Timestamp offset- This stores both the date and time, along with the corresponding time zone offset from Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).

This article contains more information about new field types and and tips for managing time data. 

 

Joshua-Young
by
‎08-22-2025 09:46 AM

@EmilyGeo thank you for that information. One problem with that is we use ArcGIS Enterprise 11.5 and Timestamp Offset fields are still not supported for hosted feature services. Plus it seems like there are still Esri products that do not fully support the new data fields.

RTPL_AU
by
‎08-24-2025 06:47 PM

@Joshua-Young Agree.  There are other Ideas around Data/Time that intersect this one. 
One of mine is specifically around having the same Date/Time displayed all through Pro, AGOL, apps, etc.

@EmilyGeo - was it a decade ago that a 'dumb' date/time field was asked for so we can add date/time data and nothing in the Esri pipeline will try to interpret / UTC-shift / do anything to it?

I still feel that will be easier than this ongoing 'let's make it even more complicated but we don't have the resources to have the same maturity across our stack'  all the time. Pun intended.


https://community.esri.com/t5/arcgis-pro-ideas/set-and-honour-timezones-in-pro/idi-p/1632995/highlig...