Support for daylight saving time

[Svenny]

Many flows have to take into account the local time, especially when interacting with users. Working with dates and time would be much easier if Power Automate had options to convert or account for daylight saving time.

This could be very helpful as a separate action, or as a function. 

My current workaround is a call to a separate flow which does the appropriate convertions according to the rules of daylight saving in my timezone.

I would think others have similar needs and would therefore hope to see it implemented into Power Automate.

[crf2011]

Have you tried using some of the UTC conversion formulas? They work just fine in my Flows without calling a separate flow.

[Svenny]

@crf2011

Thanks for the suggestion. I will try to explain my needs and experiences a bit further as well.

I tried the convertion options initially in my flows, but the offset from UTC in my timezone varies according to the daylight saving time rules in my area.

So when it 'summertime' in my country, the UTC offset is +2. When this is not the case, my offset is +1 hours (no daylight saving). In the Power Automate convertions I have to choose one of them. Do the convertions work fine for you even with daylight saving time?

For my flows I have experienced that if I take a UTC source timestamp and convert it to my timezone, this will only return correct when daylight saving is not in effect. Consequently, if I did not implement a workaround for this (I did it with a separate Flow), I would have to update all my affected flows every time the offset changes according to the daylight saving rules. This would be a very tedious and manual job, especially as the number of flows increase.

This convertion flow receives a timestamp, does the calculation according to the daylight saving rules and returns the correct local datetime, the UTC offset in accordance with daylight saving and some other metadata.

Edit: Got my offsets mixed up in this explanation. Fixed this error.

[crf2011]

@Svenny ,

Are you using an 'addHours()' or a 'convertFromUTC()'

[Svenny]

@crf2011 

I tried making an example flow to illustrate the problem I were experiencing, but now I can't seem to reproduce it! It does indeed give me the correct offset adjusted for DST.

It works with both 'convertFromUTC()' and the 'Convert Time Zone' action. I used the 'Convert Time Zone' action in most of my flows. That is, until I somehow managed to produce this problem and implemented the workaround with calling a separate flow to apply the DST rules.

Attached a screenshot of results from the example flow for reference

Daylight saving time

No daylight saving

I can't understand how I managed to produce this problem, but it certainly is not present anymore 😁 

Thank you for the assistance!