Another Daylight Saving Issue?

[Imar]

Hi all,

Back in March I noticed an issue with the DST options on the forum.
It turned out that Europe and the US use different times to swith between winter and summer time. (http://p2p.wrox.com/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=11622)

It was also said than in October we'd switch back.

Ever since the switch, the time is an hour off again. It says it's 9:19 pm, while over here it's 8:19 pm.

Is it a bug this time, or hasn't the time changed on the P2P servers?

Imar
---------------------------------------
Imar Spaanjaars
Everyone is unique, except for me.
While typing this post, I was listening to: I Let Love In by Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds (Track 6 from the album: Let Love In) What's This?

[bluckcuck]

It should be fixed now.

It was a strange ASP date comparison issue. Apparently 10/31/2004 02:00:00 doesn't compare the same as 10/31/2004 02:00:00 [u]AM</u>.

The code that builds the end date for DST starts with the last day in October at 2:00am and while that day is not a Sunday, subtracts one day. The goal is to find the last Sunday in October. This year it was 10/31 so the loop didn't have to iterate.

The code looked like this:

endDate = "10/31/" & currentYear & " 02:00:00"
while DatePart("w",endDate) <> 1
    endDate=DateAdd("d",-1,endDate)
wend

The result of this code for this year is 10/31/2004 02:00:00 since no loops were required (10/31 was a Sunday).

Strangely enough, the following test returns true (when it should fail):

startDate = "04/04/2004 02:00:00 AM"
endDate = "10/31/2004 02:00:00"

if (now() >= startDate) and (now() <= endDate) then
    'Adjust for daylight savings time
end if

Notice the missing "AM" on the endDate. Adding that back in makes the test work correctly. The reason the code failed this year is because no loops were required. The DateAdd function would add the "AM" back on to the date.

Very strange.

Bruce Luckcuck
Director, Applications & Support Services
Wiley Publishing, Inc.

[Imar]

Hi Bruce,

Thanks for fixing this, and thanks for the detailed explanation.

It is indeed weird. From what I can see, the test should indeed fail. Then again, dates and times are always causing odd problems, so I am not really that surprised. Maybe you should convert the end- and startdate to a datevalue first.....

Cheers,

Imar
---------------------------------------
Imar Spaanjaars
Everyone is unique, except for me.

[bluckcuck]

quote:Originally posted by Imar
 Maybe you should convert the end- and startdate to a datevalue first.....

That's basically what I did to fix the problem. I just changed the logic to start one day outside DST to force one iteration of the DateAdd.

I've been asked why I need to keep calculating the date and can't I just store it once (from an efficiency perspective). The problem is that all dates and times presented in the site must be adjusted. Thus I always need to find the begin/end dates for the year of the date in question. I suppose I could cache the dates by year since there shouldn't be that many different years. It comes down to balancing the I/O of a database read vs. a small loop of (at most) 7 iterations. Well, that's for when I'm bored and have absolutely nothing else to do. :D

Bruce Luckcuck
Director, Applications & Support Services
Wiley Publishing, Inc.