[jboss-user] [jBPM] - Re: Concept of different locales/time zones in jBPM5

[Peter Horvath]

Peter Horvath [http://community.jboss.org/people/h.peter] created the discussion

"Re: Concept of different locales/time zones in jBPM5"

To view the discussion, visit: http://community.jboss.org/message/563664#563664

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Hello,

I absolutely agree that internationalization should be the responsibility of the presentation layer. The problem is that the current implementation of jBPM neither store nor use UTC time and date internally: the engine always rely on the local time and date which can lead issues in an environment where your clients are in different locations (and time zones).

Modifying the current version is a bit tricky - that's why I think this issue should be considered from the beginning of jBPM 5's development. Basically, in jBPM 4 the current date is estabilished by org.jbpm.pvm.internal.util.Clock.getCurrentTime() method. The current implementation simply returns 'new Date()' which contains the local timestamp. If the UTC time was returned here that would mean that you store the date consistently from all locations but at the same time, you would also have to modify the code in a lot of places (date based queries in service interfaces; JobExecutor service scheduling etc) so I am a bit reluctant to say that all these parts should be rewritten.

I understand that providing support for different time zones and business calendars might seem to be a huge overhead without too much gain but I think that providing at least some extenstion points to allow you to hook in your own solutions is essential. I am not sure what others think about this but my feeling is that the lack of time zone / different business calendar support is the last major argument one could raise agains using jBPM in a large scale enterprise environment. Apart from this issue I do think that from many perspectives it is better than a number of other commpercial workflow engines.
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