SharePoint/Flow Date/Time conversion not working correclty

[Berny]

I have a flow that run on new item creation, all that it does is take the fields from the new item and creates a combined title.  Of course since dates that are entered into SharePoint are converted to UTC it is not as simple as just concatinating a few fields 😞

So here is what is happening right now

I enter a date (4/4/2019 7:00 PM)

I convert the time from UTC to Centeral Standard Time (UTC -6)

I add the date to the new title.

The date in the new title shows up as 4/4/2019 9:00 PM

What I think is messing up is right now Central Standard time (UTC -6) is actually Centeral Daylight Savings Time (UTC -5) for some reason the calculations being done converting CST to UTC is dropping an hour.

So let's take this step by step

Here is the item entered into SharePoint

So now we go over to Flow - this is the same date field in Flow (showing the results of the run) 

As you can see here the time is now UTC but the time is the Entered Time - 5 - ok that works since it is now Daylights savings time so we actually are UTC -5 instead of UTC -6.

Ok so now lets convert that date back to CST

Hum now the time is showing as 9:00 PM. That does not work work correctly - the dates in question are the exact same as when they were converted to UTC so why doesn't it convert back correctly?

[Berny]

Before anyone asks - I am adding the item to SharePoint using the flow owner account who's time zone is set as CST

[v-yamao-msft]

HI @Berny,

What’s the time zone on your local PC? Please make sure local PC have the same time zone with SharePoint.

Have you tried with other time zones? Will you get the same issue with a different time zone but no CST?

I made a test with UTC+8, and it returned the proper date time. However, it seems that it won’t work as expected when I made the test with CST.

Could you make a different test and back to me the result?

Best regards,

Mabel Mao

[Berny]

duplicate

[Berny]

Hello Mabel,

Yes the comptuer is on Centeral time, which is the same timezone as the account I am using with SharePoint.

I just tried with eastern time and instead of 9 PM it becomes 10 PM which means it moves the same amount. Here is a picture of this. (the first time is done with a convert step in Flow - still set to Central time - the second, highlighted, step is done with the function ConvertFromUTC)

One question with your test of UTC+8 - Do you have Daylights savings time? I am wondering if that could be messing up the calculations.

The sharepoint entry states it's time is "2019-04-05T02:00:00Z"

 I have done the following tests

- Eastern Standard Time (UTC-5) - 10 PM

- Atlantic Standard time - (UTC-4) - 11 PM

- Newfoundland Standard time (UTC -3:30) - 11:30 PM

- Greenland Standard time (UTC -3) - 12 PM

- Dateline Standard Time (UTC -12) - 4/4/2019 2:00 PM ----- This one worked

- Hawaiian Standard Time (UTC -10) - 4/4/2019 4:00 PM ----- This one worked (verrified it does not do daylights savings time)

- GMT Standard Time (UTC) - 4/5/2019 3:00 AM

- Greenwich Standard Time (UTC) - 4/5/2019 2:00 AM ----- This one worked

- Central Europe Standard Time (UTC +1) - 4/5/2019 4:00 AM

So from this list I hope you can see that this is not an isolated incident. Since "Dateline Standard Time" and "Greenwich Standard Time" worked but the GMT Standard time did not I am really thinking that the issue has to do with daylight savings time.

side note this time zone did not work at all in the function. (from https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/embedded/gg154758(v=winembedded.80))

1010

UTC-2

(UTC-02:00) Coordinated Universal Time -02

[Berny]

Hello Mabel,

Yes the comptuer is on Centeral time, which is the same timezone as the account I am using with SharePoint.

I just tried with eastern time and instead of 9 PM it becomes 10 PM which means it moves the same amount. Here is a picture of this. (the first time is done with a convert step in Flow - still set to Central time - the second, highlighted, step is done with the function ConvertFromUTC)

One question with your test of UTC+8 - Do you have Daylights savings time? I am wondering if that could be messing up the calculations.

The sharepoint entry states it's time is "2019-04-05T02:00:00Z"

 I have done the following tests

- Eastern Standard Time (UTC-5) - 10 PM

- Atlantic Standard time - (UTC-4) - 11 PM

- Newfoundland Standard time (UTC -3:30) - 11:30 PM

- Greenland Standard time (UTC -3) - 12 PM

- Dateline Standard Time (UTC -12) - 4/4/2019 2:00 PM ----- This one worked

- Hawaiian Standard Time (UTC -10) - 4/4/2019 4:00 PM ----- This one worked (verrified it does not do daylights savings time)

- GMT Standard Time (UTC) - 4/5/2019 3:00 AM

- Greenwich Standard Time (UTC) - 4/5/2019 2:00 AM ----- This one worked

- Central Europe Standard Time (UTC +1) - 4/5/2019 4:00 AM

So from this list I hope you can see that this is not an isolated incident. Since "Dateline Standard Time" and "Greenwich Standard Time" worked but the GMT Standard time did not I am really thinking that the issue has to do with daylight savings time.

side note this time zone did not work at all in the function. (from https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/embedded/gg154758(v=winembedded.80))

1010

UTC-2

(UTC-02:00) Coordinated Universal Time -02

[Berny · Accepted solution]

Well once I got on a call with a Support person from Microsoft Flow and they looked at the issue the solution was that there is yet another timezone setting - SharePoint's own timezone setting.

Once this was changed from UTC -8 to UTC -6 everything decided to work well.

So to change this setting you need to go to

site settings >

Regional settings >

Change the timezone

So the issue was on my side - not setting all the timezones correctly 😞