Fellow SAP Mobile community members,
I have a question regarding an apparent timezone issue that I seem to be experiencing in SAP Work Manager (or more broadly, in an Agentry application server on SMP2.3) and was hoping that you could help me out. It will take a bit of time to explain so please bear with me...
Firstly, some environment details:
App: SAP Work Manager 5.3.0.0
App client platform: iOS 7.0.4
App server platform: SMP 2.3 Service Pack 3 Patch Level 1 (running an instance of Agentry server 6.1.3.10212)
Now, on to the issue itself:
We are implementing SAP Work Manager for a customer in Tasmania, Australia which belongs to timezone AUSTAS (or AEST). The timezone is GMT+10 with 1 extra hour added for Daylight Savings (as is the case at the moment, since we are in summer time here).
So today, Tuesday 14th January 2014, at 14:49 local time I fire up the app on my iPad and logon (while online). Then I go to SAP Control Center to view my session details and see this:
SMP seems to believe that the logon takes place on Sunday, February 1st 2015 at 02:49 EST!!
First thing that became obvious was the problem with date/time format localisation. I found that when SMP sees 14/01/2014 it applies the US-based date/time format of mm/dd/yyyy which causes it to regard it as 1st day of 14th month of year 2014 (which becomes 1st day of 2nd month of year 2015 when you roll the 13th and 14th months over to the following year)... Interestingly enough, the actual Windows server where SMP is installed is configured to use Australian date/time format dd/mm/yyyy but SMP doesn't seem to be concerned with localising its date/time to the server's operating system format:
So, the first part of the problem is the date/time formatting and localisation. Now, on to the second part of the problem - the actual timezone difference between the client device and the SMP server:
Once again, today on Tuesday 14th January 2014, at 15:27 local time I fire up the app in ATE and logon (while online). It performs a sync and I look at the objects to examine their timestamp. Here is what I see:
The timestamp of a work order object that was just received by the ATE client is 15th January 2014 at 02:27... The strange thing is that the date/time is in the future!
When I compared the future date/time in ATE with the current local date/time which I was expecting, I realised that the difference is +11 hours (i.e. GMT+10 plus one hour for daylight savings): 15/01/2014 02:27:33 - 14/01/2014 15:27 = 11 hours
Given that SAP backend system's timezone is AUSTAS, I believe the following is the cause of the issue:
The SMP platform assumes that the backend SAP system will always be in the GMT timezone and it therefore decides to convert the timestamp from SAP to the client's local timezone (in our case, GMT+10 plus 1 hr of Daylight Savings). But of course what SMP doesn't know is that the backend SAP system is already in the relevant timezone.
In essence, we are applying the timezone conversion on top of the already converted timestamp, thus pushing the timestamp into the future... For example, it's 14/01/2014 15:27 in SAP when the transmit happens. SMP takes that timestamp, assumes the timestamp is in GMT time, and applies a conversion to the local timezone:
14/01/2014 15:27 + 10 hours + 1 hour for Daylight Savings = 15/01/2014 02:27 and that's how ATE receives it...
Any suggestions on what I'm missing here??? Maybe there is some setup I have forgotten to add in an .ini file somewhere??
By the way, my Agentry.ini file already contains the entries for mapping timezones between the client app and the SMP server:
Any help is greatly appreciated.
Thanks and regards,
Roman.
Tags edited by: Michael Appleby