Date and time formats

Rational® DOORS® date values between 1970 and 2036 are stored in the Rational DOORS database in terms of universal coordinated time (UTC). UTC was developed as the international time standard. It is like Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) except that it observes no daylight saving time (DST) and is based on a 24-hour clock. Zero (0) hours UTC is midnight GMT. The local 24-hour time convention is converted to UTC by adding or subtracting hours based on your location. It takes into account the prime meridian and local daylight saving time considerations.

If you are in one time zone and edit data, the timestamp for the edit is displayed at different local times on each Rational DOORS client but is stored at the same absolute time in UTC on the database server.

For example, a user in the Atlantic Time zone in Canada signs a baseline at 11:00 local time. A user in the Pacific Time zone then views the signature. The time that the user in the Pacific Time zone sees for the signature is 7:00. The signature time is stored on the server in UTC (15:00).

The time that is recorded is the time on the database server, not the time on the client. It is stored in UTC regardless of the time zone of the client or the server.

In pre-8.0 versions of Rational DOORS, date attribute values did not include the information to make time zone adjustments. As a result, date attribute values in migrated data might not display as expected. For example, if clients in multiple time zones were working on data, suspect links might not operate as you would expect.

When migrated data is opened and saved in this version, migrated date and time values are given a UTC timestamp. These timestamps assume that the migrated data was created in the time zone of the client that saved them. Migrated data that has been saved in this version will work in the same way as data that originates in this version.

Related concepts:
Locales and languages
Rational DOORS default locale
Supported locale formats
Related tasks:
Setting a locale for legacy data
Changing the Rational DOORS language

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