Well, that response you got from Support is not what I would have expected, so I just did a bit of testing.
I created a new table and added some rows via the API, using curl from a terminal. Here are the results:
(NB: this was with a regular table. See further below for results with a Big Table.)
In the above:
- The first column is a date/time column with respect time zone enable
- The second column is a date/time column with respect time zone not enabled
- The third column is the value I passed to the API for the first two columns.
ie. each of my 3 add row mutations passed identical values to all 3 columns.
As a baseline, my local time zone is Asia/Singapore (UTC+8)
So, observations:
- The Respect Time Zone setting DOES make a difference when passing dates via the API
- Including a time zone offset also DOES make a difference when passing dates via the API
Looking at the results row by row:
- Row 1:
– The first column is correct. I passed 3pm and Glide correctly added my offset and so I see 11pm
– The second column is also correct. - Row 2:
– The first column is correct. I passed 3pm, but I included a TZ offset, and so that was taken into account.
– The second column is also correct. It’s not respecting my time zone, so the value passed is shown as UTC - Row 3:
– It looks like Glide messed up the first column. When passing a date only to a column with respect time zone enabled, I would expect the time to be interpreted as midnight, and then with my offset applied I would see Jan 22 at 8am (not 8pm)
– The second column looks correct. Date only passed, no time zone offset, respect time zone disabled, so treat as midnight UTC.
In summary, it appears that Glide does the right thing in most cases, with the exception being where you pass a date without a time to a column where respect time zone is enabled.
Update:
Immediately after posting this, I noticed that your original question was referring to Big Tables. My testing above was done with a regular table, so I repeated the test with a Big Table to see if there was any difference. And it turns out there is. Here are the results with a Big Table:
Observations:
- The first thing to notice is that the results in both columns are the same in all cases, so we can say the the respect timezone setting does indeed have no effect when adding dates to a Big Table.
- In rows 1 & 2, I am seeing the result as 11pm. This makes sense, because Glide would be treating the value I passed as UTC, and I see it with my offset applied (+8)
- Row 3 again looks dodgy. If I’ve passed a date without a time I would expect Glide to treat that as midnight UTC, and so again I should see it as 8am. But I see it as 8pm, which looks wrong.