Hi all,
I sure hope someone out there can help me with some general advise on this one :
Facts :
- An ERP package consisting of over 9,000 business functions, date and time obviously all over the place.
- A formal "Intercompany" module, allowing one company to place orders at the other the system applying both transactions with one logical transaction.
- The system (due) runs in several different time zones, all remote users using WTS (so sifferent timezones on one WTS system)
How on earth do I approach this ?
Of course each "PC" can have its own time zone set (already difficult enough within a Terminal Server environment).
I can imagine one user in timezone GMT-6 placing an order at his local time 9:00am, that order arriving in the company in GMT+1 at 4:00pm. This feels right because in GTM+1 it really IS 4:00pm when in GTM-6 it really IS 9:00am.
The above, however, implies that times have to be converted real-time, since the user in GTM-6 will want to see his order being there at 9:00am.
I imagine that where i.e. the purchage order in GMT-6 - and the connected sales order in GMT+1 both MUST be in the database at a common time, e.g. the server time (let's say that that's GMT+1 in this case).
I imagine that all TIME() functions, but also the retrieval of database fields must go through some MyTimeZoneFunction(), right ?
It occurred to me that VFP has some helptekst about localizing dates and times, but that this is about the user interface only. At least there could have been a ServerTime() and a TimeZoneTime() function ...
There is only 20 years fox experience here, but this one never occurred to me. I thought : in the States this is more obvious, so let's ask ... Do I miss it all ? (yes please)
Thanks very much for any help !
Peter