Rails 3.1 time zone confused?

Question

Here is my current situation:

I have a user class that has an attribute time zone.

When the user creates a Lecture with start_time (3pm) and end_time (5pm), I want to ensure that in the database the start_time and end_time are actually 3pm and 5pm, in the user's time zone.

In my application controller I'm doing the following:

def set_timezone
  if current_user
    Time.zone = current_user.time_zone or "Eastern Time (US & Canada)"
  end
end

When the above lecture is saved to the database it seems to add 4 hours. Is it converting it back to UTC? The odd thing is that when I display the time in the view it is correct (I'm guessing it's converted from the UTC time back to the EST time).

I want it so that that if a user selects 4pm it is saved in the database as 4pm AND when I display that time in the view it is 4pm. What am I currently doing wrong?

EDIT: it appears that rails also converts all times to UTC when storing them in the database. Which is ok until I do a query that involves time (I'll have to manually convert it to UTC).

Dave Newton Dave Newton · Accepted Answer · 2011-10-24T02:27:37

MySQL also has a time zone.

Notably (emphasis mine):

The current session time zone setting affects display and storage of time values that are zone-sensitive. This includes the values displayed by functions such as NOW() or CURTIME(), and values stored in and retrieved from TIMESTAMP columns. Values for TIMESTAMP columns are converted from the current time zone to UTC for storage, and from UTC to the current time zone for retrieval.

Whether or not it's worth doing anything about it... not sure. I'm skeptical.

Rails 3.1 time zone confused?

1 Answers