Event page type - Event date with timezone

Brendon McCarthy asked on April 16, 2015 20:27

I'm looking for a way to set the timezone on an event date for the event page type. The options afforded to the date time control type are as follows and apply to all page types that use date times:

Inherit - inherits the time zone settings from the Page placeholder web part that displays the page template containing the web part (only applies to nested pages). Server - uses the server time zone settings. Web site - uses the website time zone settings. User - uses the time zone settings of individual users. Custom - uses the time zone selected in the Custom time zone property.

There is however no option to set the timezone per an event. For our case, we have events all over the world. The date and time needs to be displayed for the specific timezone the event is in. This is possible using the date time conversion methods in a transformation, but there is no setting to know which time zone the date is in.

To workaround this limitation, we added a timezone field to the event page type and then convert to the proper date time. This causes a complication in that you must manually adjust the date time field to an offset of one of the above options. Here is an example:

Event Date Time: 12/1/2015 8:00 AM Timezone: BangkokHanoiJakarta

Server time is configured for Mountain Time. In the Event page type, the Event Date timezone property is configured to "Inherit".

To get the proper date displayed, you must enter the time as Mountain Time. With this adjustment the date time set in the Event Date field would have have to be 11/30/2015 5:00 PM. As you can imagine, this leaves room for much error and is not user friendly.

Ideally, there would be an option on the date time control to set a manual timezone. Why this does not exist, I'm clueless.

Any one have a better solution?

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