Handling timezones in Sanity.io richDate fields

Hello Sanity Community. I have users enter data in a richDate field. The issue is that users in different timezones enter data so the times are all off for users. Is it possible to specify a timezone in which the data is entered? This timezone also has PDT and PST…

Which type are you using to save the dates in the schema? The dateTime -type says it saves the date in UTC.

The type in the schema is the richDate type. I guess my issue is not with sanity itself then. I guess to guide me in the right direction, how are others handling daylight savings with users entering the same time at different timezones…

I would probably convert all dateTimes to the same timezone on saving in order to have some common ground for comparison. Then I’d allow the users browsers to convert the dates back into their timezone. Potentially with information about which timezone it uses, so users dont assume the time is given for another timezone.

Dealing with time and timezones is a horrendous minefield of gotchas, so I would heavily recommend finding a battle-tested package and using it for all it is worth rather than attempting to handle everything yourself. 🙂

That would be exactly what I need. Does sanity allow for a datetime or richDate type field to be saved as a specific timezone?

Users are using the studio to enter date data.

My understanding is that there doesnt exist a

richDate

field by default in Sanity. If you read the documentation I linked in the first post you’ll see that the

dateTime

type automatically converts times to UTC when saving. 🙂

oh. I did install the sanity richDate plugin to get the timezone data for the entered user, hoping it would help me find a solution. Ok, I finally understand. Thanks for your help.

The

richDate

plugin does not seem maintained anymore. 🙂 The last official release was when it was still a member of Sanitys monorepo. It has been moved out of that into its own repo , but there have not been any releases associated with that repo since then.
The code in your plugin should probably still be the same tho. We can see that in the
schema used internally by the `richDate` plugin , the field

utc

uses

dateTime

.

Yeah, I just noticed that. I installed since there was a “Pro Tip” in the datetime type in the sanity docs.
https://www.sanity.io/docs/datetime-type