Re: [Tsheetx-developers] Feedback on branches/txsheet-2.0-demo

[David T. <tom...@us...>]

Peter, today there are actually no reports that show any start or end times at all, only durations are shown. That said, an attendance report has been requested more than once.
 
Scott, my aim with adding durations was to make the DB queries easier, not harder. But you are right about the problem of date boundaries, I think in the original project this was seen as a super feature - but this does make all the querying harder.
 
So I guess we need to start by clean data entry, for example converting to UTC, and splitting tasks entered when they cross a (UTC) date boundary. And the user profile then needs to hold his timezone.
 
But, as an idea, we could also record the local timezone/DST every time a time is entered. It might be useful for reporting later, in particular when a user changes timezone. Bad idea? Good idea? Waste of time?
 
Dave
 


Date: Tue, 16 Nov 2010 12:36:29 +1100
From: pal...@gm...
To: tsh...@li...
Subject: Re: [Tsheetx-developers] Feedback on branches/txsheet-2.0-demo


My two cents worth:
I agree we store UTC in a neutral way in the database. I also think we use mysql functions that don't do conversions for current timezone. 

For the display of times in TSNG we use only PHP functions. That means each user needs a timezone indicator. When individual users enter times for his local timezone, those times will be converted to UTC into the database. And when an individual user displays his times, again, they're again in his timezone.

Now when times for multiple users are displayed in one report, how should that be handled? Should times be converted to the timezone of the user displaying the report? Should times be converted to each individual user's timezone and displayed? Scott is suggesting below that for reports the times should be left as is, meaning in UTC. I dunno about that. I guess I would have to do a mock-up and see how it looked.

I also like the idea of removing the individual time entries crossing date boundaries. I will have a look at that problem and post some comments.

Peter

On 16/11/10 09:26, Scott Miller wrote: 






Yes, however removing end times makes it much more difficult to collect a blocks of times from the database. But, if we also make the change to not allow individual time entries to cross date boundaries, then that problem goes away and we can eliminate end times completely.  This would certainly be fine with me…
 
-Scott