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julienc
julienc
June 8, 2026
Question

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

  • June 8, 2026
  • 4 replies
  • 2 views

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 [emoticon:ca08b2c27c2f40e993e89508acf29e0b]

4 replies

mikes0011
mikes0011
Brainy
June 8, 2026

Have you tried just using local()?

    shubhama926776
    shubhama926776
    June 9, 2026

    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()

      stefanhelzle0001
      stefanhelzle0001
      June 9, 2026

      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
        juliencAuthor
        June 9, 2026

        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),

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