Browsing around here, and I’m not seeing an easy workaround, apologies if this has been addressed.
We have a live film festival app, with people traveling from multiple timezones to join our event in IST — before they arrive, I’d like them to be able to see the lineup of films as they will be shown here in IST, and not in their phone’s locale. Presently, users in the US are seeing things scheduled to start in the middle of the night.
I understand why this happens, but I’m wondering if there’s a workaround (other than my current warning that times will display in their local zone, which is pretty clunky).
What are you using for a data source? Glide tables, for example, will allow date columns to respect time zones, so it will automatically adjust based on the user’s locale. If you are using a different data source, such as google sheets, then I have a different, but slightly more complicated solution.
Just to be clear, I do not want to respect user timezones — our event is live only, times are fixed here, and I’d like for people traveling to be able to plan their weekend in advance.
That’s how it works though. The date and time in your time zone will be converted to the correct date and time in my timezone. Let’s say you create an event for 9:00am and I’m in a timezone 2 hours later than you. For me the time of the event will display as 11:00am.
Unless I’m misunderstanding your question, it seems that yes, you do in fact want to respect timezones to show the correct time of the live event in relation to the user’s local timezone.
Since I don’t use airtable, can you tell me if you have that checkbox in your date column?
I think you are
The way I read it he wants everyone to see the same time, no matter which timezone they are in.
I’m thinking a simple solution would be to use your UTC offset algorithm, and then apply a correction based on that to force all users to the same TZ.
Ok, re-read the original post, and I think I understand now. Could it be the case that the checkbox is actually checked when it shouldn’t be? Still not sure if it’s available with airtable though. If it is, then I think unchecking it would work???
I think the checkbox is a replacement to my UTC offset formula, unless you are using google sheets.
just do the offset, and show the event local time / user time…
so there is no confusion… but @Jeff_Hager is right… make sure what kind of time is coming from Air table
Thanks, y’all. Yes, @Darren_Murphy has it right. I’ve got people previewing the program before they fly to Laos, and they’re like, “why will you have movies screening at 2:00 a.m.?”
Strangely, if I set Airtable to GMT but plug in values for our timezone, when I un-check “respect time zones” in the Glide import of the table, everything appears to be correct. I’m not sure why that works.
When you uncheck “Respect Time Zones”, then the time is taken literally and timezones are ignored. Even though the time is saved as Zulu or GMT time, Glide will ignore it.
If you added a datetime to the table and you had the checkbox checked, then I think glide will save the time as GMT after converting from a user’s local time. Then convert it back to each user’s respective timezones.
Good to know that you have the optional checkbox with Air table.
