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Expected behaviour of DateTime fields Timezone Independent / Date Only / User Local

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Posted on by Inksrm

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I have questions around the behaviour of datetime fields, specifically datetime fields where the behaviour is set to timezone independent and date only

As an example I have 3 date time fields, each of them with a different setting of Timezone Independent, Date Only and User Local. These fields are being populated via Tibco Cloud Integration (Scribe Online) and I have also created a text field to pass in the value as it is from the source system.

In the screenshot below you can see the 4 fields. The Due Date (Text) field contains the date time from the source system. In the first row this is 1/01/2019 12:00:00 AM (this is in d/MM/YYYY format).

The timezone setting for the service account that created these entries is Melbourne/Canberra/Sydney GMT+10:00

The result for the 3 date fields (in the first row) is as follows:

Timezone Independent: 31/12/2018
Date Only: 31/12/2018
User Local: 1/01/2019

Is this expected behaviour for the Timezone Independent and Date Only fields to be one day behind? I would have thought that given there is no timezone conversion applied to fields with this behavior setting that they would also display 1/01/2019? Can anyone help to clarify this or explain these results?

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LeoAlt 16,331 Moderator on at

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Hi Partner,

Let's see the difference between 3 behaviours.

1.Timezone Independent: This behaviour will ignore the local timezone and store the original date value. For example, if it is 6.30 PM on 25th June in UTC, and if you are in India, it should be 12 AM 26th June, but if you open this record in India, the date value will always be 6.30 PM on 25th June. It will be useful to store birthday.

2.Date Only: This behaviour will also ignore the local timezone and its time portion will always be 12:00 AM. You can use this field when users in different timezones share the same time.

3.User Local: As the name implies, this date behaviour will change the date to the local timezone.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/customerengagement/on-premises/customize/behavior-format-date-time-field

https://blog.magnetismsolutions.com/blog/satyvirjasra/2017/11/17/introduction-to-behaviours-of-date-and-time-fields-in-dynamics-365

https://d365demystified.com/2019/06/25/date-and-time-fields-time-zone-behavior-in-d365/

So in your case, I guess that the original datetime from Scribe Online was 31/12/2018 and when it entered to D365, it has already been transfer to local timezone as we can see "1/01/2019" so the text datetime is the same as the User Local and Timezone Independent and Dateonly stored the real original datetime from Scribe Online. I suggest that you could check the real source date.

Best Regards,

Leo

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Pankaj Gogoi 3,177 on at

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It will be converted to UTC and store in Dynamics 365. Melbourne time is 10hrs ahead of UTC.

Hope this helps

Best Regards

PG

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Inksrm 721 on at

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Thanks for the constructive feedback LeoAlt.

I will verify the real source date. I guess I was assuming that the text value would be exactly what it was in the source without any sort of conversion.

Will update this thread with my findings.

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