Zoho Creator/Deluge: Calculating with Timezone Offset
- Joel Lipman
- Zoho
- Hits: 2796
This is an article to remind me how to calculate various times for an appointment booking system based on the timezones of each party.
Why?
The use-case scenario is that our Creator server uses the US datacenter but has it's server timezone set to "US/Eastern" or "America/New_York" (-05:00). Our sales person is on the west coast in the timezone "America/Los_Angeles" (-08:00). And our customer is in "Europe/Luxembourg" (+01:00).
We want to tell our customer they have an appointment at 4pm their time in Luxembourg; tell the agent/salesperson to call the customer at 7am in Los Angeles; and tell headquarters or the system calendar that the appointment is at 10am.
How?
So adding a datetime field and calling this one the "Customers Appointment Time" is the wrong first step. Reason being is that datetime fields hold the time zone they are set in (ZohoCreator > Settings > Date and Time Settings); so as soon as you try to insert a date time and perhaps accompany that value with a timezone, several calculations happen in real-time making it really difficult to extract and use.