Handling Time Zone Awareness

Question: How does Workflow handle time zone awareness?

Answer: Workflow operates in a time zone neutral manner. All timestamps within the Workflow are the same as those saved in the database.

Question: What happens when a time zone aware request initiates a Workflow?

Answer: Currently, only known server time zone support is available in OData. If the request is time zone aware and contains timestamp data, the Workflow converts these timestamps to server time and passes them as inputs to the workflow. For example, if a request contains the timestamp 2024-02-29T14:00:00+05:00, and the server is in Australia/Brisbane(+10), the timestamp is passed into the Workflow as 2024-02-29-19.00.00.

Question: What about time zone unaware requests?

Answer: There's no change to the way unaware requests work. They will continue to work as they did previously.

Question: What if the API I'm calling inside the Workflow is time zone aware?

Answer: Within the Workflow, all API tasks behave in a time zone unaware manner, even if they are annotated as known server time zone.

Question: Will the timestamps of IFS Rest Connector tasks be converted to server time?

Answer: The timestamps of IFS Rest Connector tasks are passed as they are. Workflow does not perform automatic conversions.

Question: What happens to the input timestamp data if an event initiates a Workflow?

Answer: If the entity is annotated based on the server time zone, the timestamp data from the event are in server time.

Question: Will input data from a Workflow command be converted?

Answer: If the data source that the Workflow Command works on is time zone aware, date times in the Workflow Command payload will get converted into server time. This conversion is only done if the date time format is YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SSZ.

Question: Will input data sent in the Rest API call that starts a Workflow be converted?

Answer: If the header, X-Ifs-Time-Zone-Aware-Request is set to true and if a valid json payload structure with timestamp attribute type set as DateTime is sent, those timestamps values will be converted to server time just like in Workflow command request. Below is a sample json payload, where InitTimestampValue will be converted to server time.

{
    "variables": {
        "IncidentReferenceNo": {
            "value": "01",
            "type": "String"
        },
        "InitTimestampValue": {
            "value": "2018-03-13T11:33:40Z",
            "type": "DateTime"
        }
    }
}

Question: If my cascading Workflow uses timestamp data from a previous Workflow, should I convert them to server time before using them in the second Workflow?

Answer: The data within the first Workflow is already converted to server time, so there's no need to convert it again.