Teaching Reminder Emails Are Off Because of the UTC Time Zone Issue

[dartajax]

Here is the reminder I rcvd ..

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Dear David Leonard:

This message is a reminder for your upcoming Lecture in this School of Medicine course.

Course: test -FOR TRACKING ONLY DO NOT USE
Session: Test Session for the 28th
Date: Tue Dec 29, 2015
Time: 01:00 am - 05:00 am
Location: board room

The learner groups participating in this session are:

The learners participating in this session are:

The learning objectives listed for this session are:

The learning objectives listed for this course are:

• this is an objective

For a complete review of the session details and its associated learning materials, visit the session details on your Ilios Calendar at https://curriculum.ucsf.edu/courses/855.

If you would like to edit the details of this session and do not have editing rights in Ilios for this course please contact the School of Medicine's Curriculum Coordinator at irocket@ucsf.edu.

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This would be fine except for the fact that the session offering I was supposed to be reminded to teach actually occurs at 5pm on the previous day - 8 hours earlier (UTC - current time zone).

[jrjohnson]

Timezones the teaching reminders and change alerts are in the wrong zone because we set the server to be in UTC. But I'm wondering if that was a mistake. Maybe the server should be in the timezone of the main campus (for us Pacific Time) and then those alerts will go out with that time. We can then add the timezone to the display so users in other zones will see and understand that this is not local time.

[saschaben]

@jrjohnson discussed this a bit last night with @stopfstedt, and was thinking along the same lines; it is easier to control the configuration of time zone on the calendar / presentation side than it is on the server.

[jrjohnson]

Brining in some slack discussion as well - implicit PHP timezone is error prone (as we have seen in the last couple of days) instead we should probably use a configuration variable for institution time zone and force this when needed.

Also adding the TZ to the date display will ease some of the confusion even when these are wrong.

[jrjohnson]

Just remembered something else - PHP and Doctrine will try and 'help' by converting to local server time when storing things in the DB. So we need to force a UTC timezone on PHP no matter what else we do.