Dataset TimeZone Select

DMJerry

Hello,

Having a dataset timezone select would be amazing so you do not have to convert all of your dates one by one. Would be great to set the dates, within the dataset, to the timezone you wish and then have it convert to your company settings.

DataMaven

That gets dicey fast. Best practice is to leave your company time zone at UTC. That will minimize the number of datasets that require conversion in most cases.

ArborRose

While I have our instance set at UTC, I hate it. Domo treats API data as UTC. But the APIs I connect to are not UTC, they are in the proper US time zone. We worked tirelessly with Domo and couldn't get a solution working. Domo can't handle it unless we keep our domain set six hours ahead. That means I have to deal with converting things back to my time zone for other things.

DataMaven

@ArborRose - What is making you have to convert the times? Are the API's telling Domo what time zone they are in? If so, perhaps you can change the format so that time zone is in a separate column? As long as the data is coming into Domo in your desired time zone, no conversion should be necessary.

The only exception I have seen to this is when you are in the time zone gap when looking at visualizations with relative date filters. For example, there are 6 hours a day when today is tomorrow or vice versa, depending on how you are looking at it. Is that the issue you are facing?

ArborRose

Responding to @DataMaven….trying to explain as best I can recall. Users need to pay close attention to data structures and accuracy. If I retrieve a date, I don't want it converted to a string or a datetime value. I want a date. And I want an accurate date.

When we first configured Domo, we needed to pull from a third party API; many connectors. The data in the API had the date and times in the proper time zones. But Domo's API was assuming that the internal data was in UTC; and converting that data instead of leaving it alone. When we were validating data, we found that transactions were missing on days at the beginning or ends of our timeframe. No matter what was tried, the data summary was wrong. The only way we could get Domo to leave the data alone was to set our instance to UTC.