Java – How to store date/time and timestamps in UTC time zone with JPA and Hibernate

datetimehibernatejavajpatimezone

How can I configure JPA/Hibernate to store a date/time in the database as UTC (GMT) time zone? Consider this annotated JPA entity:

public class Event {
    @Id
    public int id;

    @Temporal(TemporalType.TIMESTAMP)
    public java.util.Date date;
}

If the date is 2008-Feb-03 9:30am Pacific Standard Time (PST), then I want the UTC time of 2008-Feb-03 5:30pm stored in the database. Likewise, when the date is retrieved from the database, I want it interpreted as UTC. So in this case 530pm is 530pm UTC. When it's displayed it will be formatted as 9:30am PST.

Best Answer

Since Hibernate 5.2, you can now force the UTC time zone by adding the following configuration property into the properties.xml JPA configuration file:

<property name="hibernate.jdbc.time_zone" value="UTC"/>

If you're using Spring Boot, then add this property to your application.properties file:

spring.jpa.properties.hibernate.jdbc.time_zone=UTC

Related Solutions

Java – How to get the current date and time in UTC or GMT in Java

java.util.Date has no specific time zone, although its value is most commonly thought of in relation to UTC. What makes you think it's in local time?

To be precise: the value within a java.util.Date is the number of milliseconds since the Unix epoch, which occurred at midnight January 1st 1970, UTC. The same epoch could also be described in other time zones, but the traditional description is in terms of UTC. As it's a number of milliseconds since a fixed epoch, the value within java.util.Date is the same around the world at any particular instant, regardless of local time zone.

I suspect the problem is that you're displaying it via an instance of Calendar which uses the local timezone, or possibly using Date.toString() which also uses the local timezone, or a SimpleDateFormat instance, which, by default, also uses local timezone.

If this isn't the problem, please post some sample code.

I would, however, recommend that you use Joda-Time anyway, which offers a much clearer API.

Php – How to get the current date and time in PHP

The time would go by your server time. An easy workaround for this is to manually set the timezone by using date_default_timezone_set before the date() or time() functions are called to.

I'm in Melbourne, Australia so I have something like this:

date_default_timezone_set('Australia/Melbourne');

Or another example is LA - US:

date_default_timezone_set('America/Los_Angeles');

You can also see what timezone the server is currently in via:

date_default_timezone_get();

So something like:

$timezone = date_default_timezone_get();
echo "The current server timezone is: " . $timezone;

So the short answer for your question would be:

// Change the line below to your timezone!
date_default_timezone_set('Australia/Melbourne');
$date = date('m/d/Y h:i:s a', time());

Then all the times would be to the timezone you just set :)

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Java – How to get the current date and time in UTC or GMT in Java

Php – How to get the current date and time in PHP

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