Time

Tizen enables you to use locale-specific calendar features by retrieving date and time information. You can also change the date, time, and time zone, and make some date- and time-related calculations. The Time API overcomes several limitations of the JavaScript Date object.

Locale refers to the set of information that is specific to a language and a country. It affects the numeric formats (decimal and list separators), date formats, and the character sorting order. It determines how a locale-specific functionality behaves; for example, how numbers are displayed or strings converted to dates.

The Time API is mandatory for both Tizen mobile and wearable profiles, which means that it is supported in all mobile and wearable devices. All mandatory APIs are supported on the Tizen Emulators.

The main features of the Time API include:

Managing the current date, time, and time zone

With the TimeUtil interface (in mobile and wearable applications), you can retrieve the current date and time. You can also get the current time zone and the number of available time zones and determine if a year is a leap year.

You can also perform other date-and time-related tasks, such as getting the date of the next and previous daylight saving time transition, converting current time to UTC standard time, and getting the time zone abbreviation.

Note
UTC is the primary time standard used by the world to track time. Time zones are created for the world as a positive or negative offset of UTC. For example, the time zone for Iceland is UTC+00:00, and the time zone for India is UTC+05:30. DST (or summer time) is the practice of clocks being advanced temporarily by a fixed time during the summer to take advantage of more daylight. Typically, this temporary adjustment is one hour. For example, one hour shift ahead in time will cause the last moment of 20:59 to jump to 22:00 instead of 21:00. In this case, the day will have 23 hours. In another scenario, one hour shift back in time will cause the day to have 25 hours.

Note

UTC is the primary time standard used by the world to track time. Time zones are created for the world as a positive or negative offset of UTC. For example, the time zone for Iceland is UTC+00:00, and the time zone for India is UTC+05:30.

DST (or summer time) is the practice of clocks being advanced temporarily by a fixed time during the summer to take advantage of more daylight. Typically, this temporary adjustment is one hour. For example, one hour shift ahead in time will cause the last moment of 20:59 to jump to 22:00 instead of 21:00. In this case, the day will have 23 hours. In another scenario, one hour shift back in time will cause the day to have 25 hours.

Getting the locale-specific date and time formats
If locale-specific settings have been made on the device, the date must be displayed in the corresponding locale-specific format. Tizen supports several different date and time formats, and you can retrieve the currently used formats.

The date and time can be expressed, for example, in a numerical format YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm:ss (for example, "1996-10-23 16:08:27") or in hybrid format (for example, "Wednesday, October 23, 1996, 04:08:27 PM").
Performing date- and time-related calculations
With the TimeDuration interface (in mobile and wearable applications), you can perform different calculations and comparisons on date and time data regardless of the time units used in the compared events.
Monitoring time and time zone changes
With the TimeUtil interface, you can retrieve notifications on time changes performed by the user.