Get current UTC time in AL

idonav · 2019-02-11

Hi all,

I would like to find a way to get the current UTC date in AL. I've been messing around with DateTime and similar, but it seems like it takes the user agent time zone in to account (which is out of our control), and it all just becomes a big mess with DateTimes not making any sense.

So, I need a way to get current UTC time, it is not an option to do a get request to external services, neither tampering with client computer time zones (spread around the world). All servers have their timezone set to UTC, so maybe I could fetch it from there in some way?

Suggestions appreciated, seems like a super simple task, but for some reason I'm not getting it to work.

ftornero · 2019-02-11

And you can use this

pageextension 50100 CustomerListExt extends "Customer List"
{
    trigger OnOpenPage();
    var
        DateTime: DateTime;
    begin
        DateTime := CurrentDateTime();
        Message('UTC Date: %1', Format(DateTime, 0, 9));
    end;
}

The fuction Format(DateTime, 0, 9) give you an string with the date and time in UTC

KTA8 · 2019-02-11

You can use a default .net object that get that system data (you don't have to develop it) and put that in run on client = false; that should work

idonav · 2019-02-11

DateTime.UtcNow from mscorlib would probably work if I developed a C/AL solution, but I need to do it in AL.

ftornero · 2019-02-11

In BC on-premise you can interop whit dotNET from AL, I don't know if that is your case.

This is the link:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/business-central/dev-itpro/developer/devenv-get-started-call-dotnet-from-al

ftornero · 2019-02-11

And you can use this

pageextension 50100 CustomerListExt extends "Customer List"
{
    trigger OnOpenPage();
    var
        DateTime: DateTime;
    begin
        DateTime := CurrentDateTime();
        Message('UTC Date: %1', Format(DateTime, 0, 9));
    end;
}

The fuction Format(DateTime, 0, 9) give you an string with the date and time in UTC

idonav · 2019-02-15

Thank you @ftornero, that works perfectly fine. The problem described in the initial post only occurs when saving it to a datetime variable, but saving it as a string does the job.

Full code below, for other (not related to this) reasons, I had to convert it to a BigInt:

    procedure GetCurrentUtcTime() UtcTime: BigInteger;
    var
        DateTime: DateTime;
        TempTime: Text;
    begin
        DateTime := CurrentDateTime();
        TempTime := Format(DateTime, 0, 9);

        TempTime := DelChr(TempTime, '=', '-:.TZ');
        Evaluate(UtcTime, TempTime);
    end;

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