In ruby on rails, how to display the time correctly in the client?

Question

I have a ruby-on-rails server that implements a JSON REST API e.g.

http://my-server.com/end_of_promotion.json

Currently, the answer is:

{
    date: "2013-03-31T14:29:16Z"
}

In my model, date is an attribute of type: datetime.

Now, I would like the client to display this date in the user timezone. How should I design the API and the client code to make it happen?

is your app aware of where the user is? Can you include the controller/model code that generates that time? — jstim, Apr 03 '13 at 20:24
Possible duplicate of http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5267170/how-to-display-the-time-in-users-timezone — Catfish, Apr 03 '13 at 20:24
You could output a unix timestamp or an RFC 2822 compliant date, then pass it to the javascript Date object, which considers the client time settings. — Chris Baker, Apr 03 '13 at 20:25
@viebel - Please mark the answer if it was helpful for you! Thank you. — sscirrus, May 16 '13 at 08:54

sscirrus · Accepted Answer · 2013-04-13T22:36:19.317

Without more detail on your situation, here are some helpful resources.

For time zones on Rails, have a look here for the various options you can use: http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveSupport/TimeZone.html

To format for your users, look into strftime. Docs: http://apidock.com/ruby/Time/strftime

A site that helps you generate strftime code: http://strftime.net/

A guide to I18n / internationalization: guides.rubyonrails.org/i18n.html (thanks @house9)

1 Answers1