why is "timezone()" giving a different value as the offset from GMT?

Question

I am a little puzzled here. 
 I need to check if a dateTime value is past a given hour of the day. But there is an issue, since it has an unpleasant behaviour : since we updated to summer time, it is wrong by 1 hour ! 
 In my record type (and user interface), the dateTime will display "6/8/2026 5:48 PM GMT+02:00", so I assume my timezone has a two hours offset. 
 However, when I use function "timezone()", it gives "60", which would be adequate (and it did for a while!) when we would still be with winter time. 
 
 Why doesn't timezone() give 120? 
 How is this possible ? Is it a known bug ? (we are using release 25.3). 
 
 Do I have to create a specific constant with the right hour and remove the days to allow calculation? 
 
 Here is what I have now: 
 a!localVariables( local!dateBegin: now(), local!heure: hour(local!dateBegin) + timezone()/60, local!minute: minute(local!dateBegin), local!isAfter17h: or( local!heure > 17, and(local!heure = 17, local!minute > 0) ), local!dayEnd: todate(local!dateBegin) + if(local!isAfter17h, 1, 0), 
 [...] 
 but it is wrong between 5 and 6 PM

Mike Schmitt · Answer

Have you tried just using local() ?

Shubham Aware · Answer

timezone() returns only the winter-time base offset and does not automatically account for daylight saving time. Use local!heure: hour(local(local!dateBegin)) local()

Stefan Helzle · Answer

Seems like you try to do your own date&time calculations. Most of the time, this is a bad idea. I tried to cover most of the date&time related tricks in this blog post: https://appian.rocks/2023/02/13/working-with-time-in-appian/

julienc · Answer

I was able to fix the issue by comparing a datetime() with a now() normalized with local(). 
 a!localVariables( local!nowLocal: local(now()), local!today17: datetime( year(local!nowLocal), month(local!nowLocal), day(local!nowLocal), 17, 0, 0 ), 
 local!isAfter17h: local!nowLocal > local!today17, 
 local!dayEnd: todate(local!nowLocal) + if(local!isAfter17h, 1, 0),

why is "timezone()" giving a different value as the offset from GMT?

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