Im interrupting the Data Template flow with a really great question and answer from the forum that I wanted to share on time zone formatting. For those of you that want to include a timezone portion into your output dates XMLP can help but you might not find what you expect!
Let's assume we have the following date element in our data stream:
2006-07-27T12:48:00.000+02:00
Notice the timezone offset from GMT i.e. Paris, France.
Using
<?format-date:DATE_TEST; 'LONG_TIME_TZ'?>
we get
Thursday, July 27, 2006 10:48 PM GMT
The GMT appears incorrect we were expecting 'Paris' ... hey thats a bug! Look closer and you'll notice that the time component has been adjusted back by 2 hrs. So it is actually correct for the GMT timezone.
So how do we stop the adjustment and see 'Paris' i.e. Thursday, July 27, 2006 12:48 PM Paris
This can be achieved using:
<?format-date:DATE_TEST; 'LONG_TIME_TZ';'Europe/Paris'?>
that 'Europe/Paris' is a java time zone specification. The list can be gotten here, http://www.thescripts.com/forum/thread15954.html
This is in the user docs but a little tough to grasp(;o). If you are in EBS then there is a profile option, more details in the user guide. If you are using APIs the java time zone can be passed into the template as a parameter. Neat!
