TDM Rerun #3: Time Is The Simplest Thing

'Time, I'll tell you about time. Time is the simplest thing.'

- Time Is The Simplest Thing, The Delphi Magazine #65, January 2001
[quote from Clifford D. Simak's The Fisherman]

Now this is one of my favorite articles. It deals with time and more specifically with time zones. As most of my articles this one also builds on real-world problems I encounter during my programming practice. In this case, it was motivated by a big coding flop which taught me an important lesson: "Never store local time in a database." [No, I still don't want to recall all the details. It was related to daylight savings time transitions, that's all I'm willing to tell.]

Anyway, I fixed the problems in the abovementioned code and during that process I found out that there is almost no support for time zones built in Delphi and that Windows APIs on that area are really not that simple to use. So I built a time zone manipulation library that handles time zone information access and time zone conversions with daylight savings time support. This GpTimezone unit is still alive and I'm using it regularly - mostly the NowUTC function.

The article also dealt with the (now happily forgotten) Swatch Time.

Also included was a neat utility (if I'm allowed to say so) for timezone conversions, which I'm still using today without any changes to the original code.

 

Links: article (PDF, 134 KB), source code (ZIP, 162 KB), current GpTimezone unit