Hi all,
I am still, after quite some time, wrangling over the time zone
system in my app. I have sorted out all the internal handling, however I
am still uncertain as to what the best way to get the user to select
their time zone is.
I was thinking of having users just select their timezones from a
list which was populated with the contents of the query:
select * from pg_timezone_names ;
which would look something like this.
http://mrnaz.com/tztest.html
This however is problematic for a number of reasons:
1. The timezone list there isn't exactly user friendly, there are many
Etc/* timezones there, as well as others that would be potentially
confusing for users who are trying to select the timezone they are in.
2. If a timezone is removed from the list for whatever reason, then the
system will be left with users who have selected a timezone that is no
longer a valid choice in the list.
The ideal situation would be to maintain my own persistent list of
timezones (the way Microsoft maintains their own user-friendly list that
they use for Windows) that maps to the timezones embedded in the PG back
end, but I haven't the resources to pull this off. Has anyone else
worked on a mechanism to allow users to supply the timezone they are in,
and if so, do you have any comments on how best to handle the apparently
mutually exclusive problems of simplicity for users and accuracy in the
back end?
At the simple end of the I can't just have users only select from a
list going from GMT-12 to GMT+12. At the complex end of the scale I'd
just give them the output from the list and any that are deprecated will
result in the user reverting to UTC until they reset a new timezone.
Comments on this usability problem are appreciated,
- Naz.
