Is there anyway I can display time in “US-Central” or “US-Eastern” format instead of “ America-New york” or “ Europe-Athens” format at the top of drop down list using Tzinfo .

I am presently using “time_zone_select” which displays US zones on top of drop down in “ America-New york” format .

TZInfo::Timezone, :default => “America/Chicago” )%>

I can display US zones in “ (GMT – 06:00 ) CentralTime (US & Canada)” by using standard rails TimeZone ( ) . But , I will have problem when I use “utc_to_local” method .

Thanks,
Madhu Nallamani

It looks like we are supposed to store “timezone” (e.g. “US/Eastern”) on the model. So, if I have an Event table, I need a column called “timezone”. Not sure why this is. First, as far as I can tell, this value isn’t automatically being stored when a record is created as I assumed it would be. Second, even if it was being stored, I don’t see the value as it appears all date/times are being stored as of UTC time. Upon recalling the date/time for display, don’t we want to convert to the user’s locale (which we don’t know until the user logs in).

Here’s another source of confusion. Most date/time values (from my perspective) are more useful in their original local timezone format. I think an events table is more useful and better queried using local time arguments, not ones I had to manipulate. That is, if I want to query events for a certain month I want to use a BETWEEN clause that reflects the true start and end of the month based on local times, not times that were fudged from UTC. Here’s where I see the valid use of the timezone attribute. Store date/times using local values and accompany them with the name of the timezone from where the record originated, so that if need be we can make the appropriate conversion.

Could you provide a practical example in the documentation of how you made use of timezone_fu? Right now, you just show how to extend the ActiveRecord model.

But awesome work and thanks for opernsourcing it!