Rails timezone and Daylight saving time

Question

for a while I´m trying to understand how this timezone times will work, and I had a question:

Today in my country, we are in Daylight saving time (GMT-2). So the u

Answer 1

There are several places where timezone can come into play: the operating system (or probably user account) default setting, the database server, Rails environment.rb.

The key is to make sure all dates are stored with UTC time zone, then displayed in whatever your local timezone is. It sounds like you're doing that.

So your question seems to boil down to "if it's Daylight time, I want to offset by -3 hours, else offset by -2 hours". The Rails time extensions let you determine your current offset like Time.zone.now.utc_offset, and Time#dst? tells you if it's Daylight Savings Time with those two you can conditionally subtract the extra hour (3600 hundred seconds).

Answer 2

7 months after you asked, but perhaps skip_time_zone_conversion_for_attributes= will help - it tells AR not to convert timezones on storage or retrieval. See [ActiveRecord Timestamp] (http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveRecord/Timestamp.html) which shows the example:

class Topic < ActiveRecord::Base
  self.skip_time_zone_conversion_for_attributes = [:written_on]
end

--Kip