Server Date Handling

Because is not feasible to reliably determine the local time for each client, the physical locations of clients are not taken into account when performing transactions. All times entered are taken as local for the server, translated into UTC, and stored in the database as UTC times.

This has several results which you might not expect:

• To run a transaction at seven P.M. local time for all your client machines, you will need one transaction per time zone.
• If you move your server to a new time zone, previously created transactions will not follow it: those times are already stored as UTC times.

  Similarly, when your area switches to Daylight Saving Time (Summer Time), previously created transactions are not affected, and will appear an hour late compared to local clocks. Transactions created during Daylight Saving Time will appear to be an hour early when your time zone moves its clocks back.

• Daylight Saving Time (Summer Time) is taken into account only when you create a transaction. For example, in the United States, the time between 2:00 and 2:59 A.M., on April 3, 2005 does not exist. If you try to create a transaction with a start time of 2:30 on that day, it will be automatically set to occur at 3:30.

Because of the potential confusion surrounding time zones, you may find it most convenient to set your server's clocks to use UTC as their local time zone, and then schedule all transactions on that basis.