Is there anything that reduces the Olson time zone list into a readable format for the UI (like Google Calendar does)?

Question

I am writing an app that asks the user to choose a time zone. I am getting my list of time zones from the Olson database (via NodaTime) but that is a massive list with many redundant entries, for my purposes at least.

When you create an event on Google Calendar it lets you choose the time zone from a relatively small list with ordering by country where necessary. I would like to be able to achieve something as simple as that without creating a separate database, which is what this person does.

Because I am writing this in C# MVC plus JavaScript on the front end, I am looking for a library in either of those languages that gives me a reduced list in a user-friendly format that I could display in a dropdown. Is there such a thing or do I have to create my own and regularly keep it up to date, like the example shown in the hyperlink?

Answer 1

Two possible answers here:

• Information from the zone.tab file. As it happens, just today another contributor mailed the list with an hg clone which uses this data. I haven't looked at it yet, but hope to do so over the weekend - and after a bit of massaging, we'll hopefully get it into the 1.1 branch.

• Information from CLDR. This provides suggested example cities to present to a user - it's designed for exactly this purpose (even localized, I believe). However, you'd need to integrate this with Noda Time yourself; we don't currently have any code for this, and just getting to grips with CLDR will take some time.

Apologies for this not being solved out of the box - but we're aware of it and hope to provide an answer over time.