Time Zone Context

Overview

In Appian, date and time (or datetime) data is adjusted to display in the correct time zone for the user who is viewing the data. A date and time is displayed in your preferred time zone, in a system-wide timezone setting, or in a process designer-specified time zone.

See also: Data and Time and Internationalization Settings.

When designing an application, you can set a process time zone context for the date and time data or date and time functions used in a process from the Process Model Properties dialog on the General tab.

This setting can be referenced in your process models using the pp!timezone property which is listed as the default time zone for recurring activity schedules.

Reports, rules, and dashboards take the context of the current user as shown in the table below.

Context	Time Zone used
Non-User-Initiated Process	As Configured
User-Initiated Process	As Configured (OR) Initiator's Time Zone
Subprocess	Parent Process' Time Zone

As Configured refers to the fact that the time zone can be specified by the developer in the Process Model Properties dialog on the General tab. Programmatically launched processes always use the configured time zone. Subprocesses always use the parent process' time zone.

When the time zone context is used

The Date and Time functions gmt(), local(), now(), and today() and functions that cast a date and time value to a string of text (such as the tostring() and text() functions) use one of the process time zone contexts and take the user's time zone when the functions are evaluated in a process.

The timeZone process property returns the time zone ID currently used by a process instance (its context).

The Due Today filter (on the Filter tab of the Reports view) uses the context time zone to determine today and whether the deadlines for tasks and processes fall within that day for the user viewing the report.

Notifications with expressions evaluated in the body have those expressions evaluated as part of the context flow before the data is sent to notifications. These expressions are evaluated using the context time zone.

Calendar expression functions (a!addDateTime(), a!subtractDateTime(), and functions starting with cal*) do not use the time zone context. They operate based on the calendar time zone.

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