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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-20T01:46:31+00:00

I am defining a schema for my web service that will be accessed from

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I am defining a schema for my web service that will be accessed from multiple countries. I am wondering which of the below 2 should be used (both are valid according to xsd dateTime type and ISO 8601) and which one of them is WS-I compliant?

  1. UTC format like 14:15Z or 14:15:00Z. The appended Z letter indicates that the time is represented in UTC.
  2. Alternatively, use a local time with explicit zone designation in one of the formats [+/-]hh:mm. Example: 12:15+02:00
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  1. Editorial Team

    It is somewhat subjective – both are OK. I prefer UTC. You likely need to convert the time to client local anyway (and you should rely on information from the client to do so, since the user may login from different timezones). When storing in UTC, you have to worry less about the details of how storage is taking place, since all times are represented in the same timezone and it is much easier to compare (and thus sort).

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