Saving datetime in UTC isn't accurate sometimes

Question

In general, best practice when dealing with dates is to store them in UTC and convert back to whatever the user expects within the application layer.

That doesn\'t neces

Answer 1

I vote the simplest route and that's saving to UTC. Create a column for country of origin, set up a google alert for "daylight savings time", and if Chile decides to stop using daylight savings or alter it in some crazy way, you can adapt by querying your database for Chilean users and adjusting their dates accordingly with a script. Then, you can use Time.parse with the date, time and timezone. To illustrate, here are the results the day before daylight savings and after daylight savings on 3/13/2016:

Time.parse("2016-03-12 12:00:00 Pacific Time (US & Canada)").utc
=> 2016-03-12 20:00:00 UTC
Time.parse("2016-03-14 12:00:00 Pacific Time (US & Canada)").utc
=> 2016-03-14 19:00:00 UTC

This will get you a list of the accepted time zone names:

timezones = ActiveSupport::TimeZone.zones_map.values.collect{|tz| tz.name}