Current time should use UTC not localtime

[grobie]

As a user,
I want to send a link with the current range and until parameters set.

Current option is to click on the current date in the date picker to fill in the date + time. That time represents the user's localtime though, for example for a user in EST(UTC-05:00) setting the dashboard 5 hours into the past.

Expected:
Clicking on the date fills in the curent date+time in UTC as used by promdash.

[stuartnelson3]

this sounds reasonable to me, but this has been discussed with @juliusv before, and I believe the prometheus web client functions the same way (using localtime).

is this true, j? given that links are shared across time zones, standardizing seems to be prudent

[juliusv]

I think the problem is that if you click on a date in the datetimepicker, it chooses the current local time, but PromDash interprets it as UTC. I.e. if I click on a date in Berlin, it sets it to 13:00 (if it's 13:00 in Berlin), but since PromDash is using UTC, that actually means 14:00 Berlin time (so PromDash will try to show data 1h in the future). What I would expect is that it's all happening in UTC, so it'd choose the current time in UTC instead of local time.

[stuartnelson3]

-.- not sure what's going on.

the datetimepicker we're using is attempting what it thinks is the UTC time, but is incorrect.

date is the wrong time (an hour in the future), which the datetime picker is then moving back an hour to supposed UTC time.

(this time is an hour ahead of when I took the screencap)

sigh

[juliusv]

On Sat, Mar 7, 2015 at 1:09 AM, Tobias Schmidt [email protected]
wrote:

Could this be related shutterstock/rickshaw#504
shutterstock/rickshaw#504 @stuartnelson3
https://github.com/stuartnelson3?

No, the problem happens in the date picker, not in Rickshaw. Clicking on a
date when no time is set yet should set the date picker to today/now in
UTC, but it sets it to today/now in local time (although the result is
actually interpreted as UTC (which it should)).

[grobie]

@juliusv Yeah, figured in the meantime and deleted it. The datepicker plugin is ugly to say the best. I don't know why they do all that wrapping of dates.

[grobie]

Bump. This is such an annoying bug, can we use a different datepicker maybe? Or fix it? Or check whether the bug was fixed in the datepicker plugin?

[juliusv]

Perhaps, yes. For reference, this is the current one we're using:

https://github.com/tarruda/bootstrap-datetimepicker

(it has recent updates)

...and this is another one we could try out:

https://github.com/Eonasdan/bootstrap-datetimepicker