Downloading Trends

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1

Hi,

I was downloading some interactive trends this week from groov and with the help of product support noticed that the trend time stamps are displayed in UTC Time Zone.

With manipulating the timestamp in Microsoft Excel we could get it to my time zone of UTC+10 with the following formula:

Original formula and data:

=(A2/1000 + (“1/1/1970”-“1/1/1900”+1) * 86400) / 86400

7/18/2017 2:02AM

Modified to add +10 hours

=(A2/1000 + (“1/1/1970”-“1/1/1900”+1) * 86400) / 86400 +10/24

7/18/2017 12:02PM

My question is though can there be a setting added into groov that nominates the time zone you are in so you don’t have to worry about the different formula?

Mark.

1 Like
2

Hi Mark,

Please know two things;

  1. Totally understand what you are asking and why.
  2. I believe that the software engineers have looked at the trend time stamps and kicked around some ideas, but keep coming back to the UTC/UNIX timestamp.
    The reason for this is that we have a lot of customers using groov across many different time zones. In other words, think of a nation wide company feeding PAC data back to a central groov. What time zone do you put on each trend?

The other challenge is daylight savings. Having the trends roll forward and back for each location just complicates things unnecessarily.

By having the same time stamp the same across all locations, we allow each customer full flexibility to adjust the time stamp to suit their company needs.

Granted, the groov manual does not really go into detail on how to do this and we will be looking at addressing that shortfall.

3

Hi Ben,

You made some good points that I hadn’t thought of. Makes sense with using that time stamp to allow each customer to adjust it to suit their needs.

Mark.

4

Small correction: it’s a Java/JavaScript timestamp (milliseconds since January 1 1970, UTC), not a UNIX timestamp (seconds since January 1 1970, UTC).