Anyone come up with a better UI for timezone selection?

[simeon]

Hey,

I am currently stuck with this mammoth list of timezones that the server side java components spits out. It has numerous values for each time zone. It looks something like this:

(GMT-11:00) Pacific/Midway

Supposedly some of these options have specialized daylight savings time settings.

I am trying to get my head around the factors at play on this.

Has anyone come up with a better UI for timezone selection other than a select box with 100+ options in it?

[Animal]

Yes, Java covers all possible bases doesn't it. We had that problem. I'll look at our code tomorrow to see how we cut down the liost to manageable proportions.

[sartori]

This not ext.js but it is a pretty cool way of selecting timezones using google maps

http://www.gchart.com/

It's accurate enough to cover things like Florida having two time zones.

Would be cool to have this as an ext plugin.

[Animal]

We drop a whole load of time zones when we iterate through to create the List for the combo:


java.util.TimeZone[] timeZones = DateUtils.getAllTimeZones(); // function to get them all
for (java.util.TimeZone t : timeZones) {
String id = t.getID();

// 3 Character time zone codes are deprecated in JRE 1.5 because there are ambiguities:
// "CST" could be U.S. "Central Standard Time" or "China Standard Time"
if ((id.length() > 3) && !id.startsWith("Etc")) {
String tzName = t.getDisplayName();

// Don't include zones with generic "GMT+n" descriptions.
if (!tzName.startsWith("GMT-") && !tzName.startsWith("GMT+")) {
// add to List

[simeon]

thanks nige!