Date Internationalization Format

Ministry of Testing

Case Study:

We've recently added some international clients who want dates displayed in the UK format, so we are testing a date internationalization release. Has anyone run into any issues when implementing that kind of change that I should be particularly on guard for? Not the obvious ones, but anything that surprised you?

-- Anonymous

Recommendation 1:

Will daylight saving time impact your dates at all? If so, keep an eye out for that. We were doing a release at my past job and couldn't figure out why one particular field on a particular record was incorrect, until we realized DST came into play. It's been so long that I don't recall the exact details, but it was something like the hours this record had been in a particular state.

-- John Schultz

Recommendation 2:

Yeah note that UK is NOT GMT/UTC. It depends on daylight saving. Assuming we are is a mistake. Our change is 3 weeks after the US in March, and a week before you, in Oct. Last full weekend in March and last full weekend in October. (How do I know? Radio ham contests are scheduled based on the weekend in March and October, and as a radio ham this is seminal in my hobby calendar. Don’t get between geeks and their hobbies!) And if writing out dates in full we say “4th of ” never (for example) May 4”. We rarely use 24 clocks. 5.35pm, not 17h35 (which they do use in, for example, France). For months, when a computer might convert 3/15/2020 to a UK date it might come out as 15/03/2020 we omit the leading zero.

-- Mike Ruttenberg

Recommendation 3:

I always have to ask are we using the server time or the local time, especially if the server you are working on is another country! I tend to say 5.30 then add the pm or am ha! I have not heard many people use the 24 hr clock expression in the UK.

-- Brian MacRoberts

Recommendation 4:

I’ve had issues around not just dates, but the timestamp used on those dates. Such as 20/05/2020 00:00:00. Front End only needed to display the date, where as the BE required time (HH:MM:SS) and date. Do when we had Day light saving, this caused issues around when things needed to be triggered e.g You need to have replied to us within 14 days. Other issues are server and local times can cause havoc. Constancy throughout the system, integration with other systems etc.

-- Ghall

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