Question

I am having a project which will have country dropdown at the top to select countries. For example USA, India and Hong Kong. Depends on the country selection several features will be enabled or disabled.

In project I am having base country by default for example India. So whenever any user will come. I want to store its login datetime as per Indian standard time regardless user is from Hong Kong, USA or India. My webserver is hosted in USA.

Is that possible?

Answer 1

What you want to do is store any datetime value as UTC. Which means storing as a time zone independent value.

You can either set some sort of insert trigger in your MS-SQL server (I assume you use MS-SQL because of the asp.net part). There you determine the UTC time like this.

`-- MS SQL (use instead of GETDATE())
DECLARE @currentTime datetime
SET @currentTime = GETUTCDATE()`

If you want to do it in code just use UtcTimeNow to access the UTC time.

    // C# (use instead of DateTime.Now)
DateTime currentTime = DateTime.UtcNow;

If you want you can always convert the UTC time to any given local time. By using the TimeZoneInfo class.

That way you have the right time in your database (UTC) and can convert it to the appropriate time for the User.

The most important part when dealing with times and timezones is to store it as UTC. That way it’s can be transported and compared easily.