Date headaches

Certified Associate Developer

I've been having headaches with dates in Appian and I think it has to do with the way appian handles timezones. 

Unless I'm mistaken, appian is supposed to record dates in GMT then then later read them in whatever local time zone is appropriate. What I'm finding is that it records in the local time zone, then later reads it as though it were GMT and adjusts to the local time zone, resulting in incorrect dates. 

The more frustrating thing about this is how I access/display the date affects what gets shown. 

For example if I use a date picker, appian records the date as 4 hours earlier. Thus 8/8/2025 will be recorded in the db as 8/7/2025 8:00 pm EDT

If I display the date in a text field, I'll get 8/7/2025 8:00 pm EDT, but if I put it through any kind of function such as text() to format what it looks like it'll come out as 8/8/2025. 

What's worse is I imported a csv of a bunch of legacy data and the dates were all converted to date/time and had the 4 hours subtracted when recorded. 

How can I keep this from happening? 

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    Certified Associate Developer
    in reply to Stefan Helzle

    I actually read through that before posting, but my problem here is that no matter how I adjust the time, it records as EDT/EST, even if the time is inaccurate. If I use a date picker, it will translate that to local time, making it a day earlier, and even if I use GMT() to translate it to the right date, the timezone it records is still EDT/EST. I want the time zone tag to be correct for the time I'm recording and it seems bizarre to me that these time zone adjustment functions like local() and gmt() don't allow you to set the time zone, just add/subtract time. 

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