Here’s how dates and times are handled in Cognito Forms with regard to time-zones:
- Entries generate three different date/time values: Date Created, Date Submitted, and Date Updated. These values can be included as tokens in both content areas and notification/confirmation emails.
- With the exception of DateTime.Today values, dates and times shown to users via the web browser are always in the time-zone of the user, not the time-zone of the form. This means the date that appears on the confirmation page will be your local time-zone.
- Dates and times that are transmitted as formatted text (Ex:
=Entry.DateSubmitted.ToString("dd/MM/yyyy")) are converted into the timezone of the form. This includes email messages, generated documents, and Excel exports. - Data integrations and JSON posts use the ISO 8601 date format for transmitting dates and times uniformly. This is now the accepted industry standard way of representing points in time in text format when a time-zone must be specified. These dates are therefore in UTC.
These rules only apply to date/time values. Date-only and Time-only fields are “time-zone-less” and are never shifted based on time zone. So for now, these rules primarily apply to the entry dates.
Learn how to use these date/time values in calculations using our Date/Time Calculations guide.