On a recent Rails application I built, I needed to determine which time zone a user was in to correctly display and use time-related information. I'll walk through two techniques I've found to get the job done.
The theory around working with time zones is pretty straightforward. Save all time-related data in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), and display all time-related data in the time zone of any given user. If you're unfamiliar with ActiveSupport's TimeWithZone, quickly check out this blog post from David Eisinger and familiarize yourself with the in_time_zone method for display purposes.
The theory around working with time zones is pretty straightforward. Save all time-related data in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), and display all time-related data in the time zone of any given user. If you're unfamiliar with ActiveSupport's TimeWithZone, quickly check out this blog post from David Eisinger and familiarize yourself with the in_time_zone method for display purposes.
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