Hi, reaching out to all those familiar with the intricacies of UK British Summer Time with clocks going back and forward 1 hour twice a year.
I've recently started developing D365 for a UK-based organisation who are using Dynamics for the first time. In D365, the Date and Time field includes
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‘User Local’ behaviour with ‘Date Only’ and ‘Date and Time’ formats
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‘Date Only’ behaviour with ‘Date Only’ format
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‘Time-Zone Independent’ behaviour with ‘Date Only’ and ‘Date and Time’ formats
Deciding on which field behaviour and format to use, as well as which time-zone setting in Personal Options UK Users should have, is an area that I’ve struggled with in the past.
In the last organisation I worked for based only in the UK, we developed version 2015 on-premise and used Date Only behaviour and format for recording a customer’s date of birth which, although contains no time element on the UI, on the database I think the date is stored with a time of midnight. When the clocks went back on hour, the birth date on all records created during the time of year when the clocks were one hour ahead, all changed to the previous day. Reporting on dates through Dynamics and through SSRS gave different results for the same data.
Can anyone advise which option is best for storing dates only such as birth/death dates so that the change in clocks do not impact the value stored in the fields?
For what type of date/time data would I use each option?
Also, for UK Users, which time-zone setting should they use in their Personal Options? Do they use GMT+00:00 Dublin, Edinburgh, Lisbon, London, or GMT Coordinated Universal Time?
Would they have to change their settings when the clocks go forward 1 hour next year? If so, which Time Zone option should they select?
Many thanks.
Aston
