GWT - Obtain Browser Timezone/Timestamp formatting

Question

I send timestamps to my GWT client using GMT/Zulu time, with each string designated as such (ie. 2012-01-19T16:29:18Z, or 4:29pm GMT). How do I show this in the browser in the local timezone? So for me in CST I expect to see 10:29am.

If I do no formatting I get the date as 4:29pm, which I expect, If I use a TimeZone object of TimeZone.createTimeZone(0), I get for some reason 10:29PM (not AM as expected). I suppose I'm supposed to pass in something more meaningful than 0, but how do I obtain the right value for the where the browser is running?

J

Answer 1

You can get the time-zone offset that is configured in the browser using:

Date d = new Date();
d.getTimezoneOffset();

It won't give you the timezone name, I don't think that's possible to get.

Do you send the time as a timestamp, or string? I find the best approach is to send UTC timestamps to the client and then format them to whatever zone I need using DateTimeFormat/TimeZone. But I guess that if you are parsing the date string including the offset, you end up with a UTC timestamp anyway.

Answer 2

If you want the GWT client code to format the time in the browser time zone, you should pass the data from the server to the client as a java.util.Date object.