Ucommerce Time Handling

The Ucommerce Connector and all its add-on applications and services handle data in different contexts and the different services may be physically located in different time zones if the servers they run on are in different countries or continents. To make sure that all data is handled correctly all dates and times are handled using Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) time.

What Is UTC Time

UTC time is the primary time standard by which the world regulates clocks and time. It is within about 1 second of mean solar time at 0° longitude and is not adjusted for daylight saving time. It is effectively a successor to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT).

The UTC time is always based on the same location and then the local time will have an offset from this time based on in which zone the user is located.

The time expressed in UTC does not differ much from the local time format. One can recognize the UTC time when the time ends with the letter ‘Z’, e.g. ‘2020-05-15T15:25:00Z’.

UTC Time Use

The Perfion application can be installed in multiple computers where each can be located in different part of the world and each machine would show the different local time. This means that if Ucommerce Connector have updated a product at some specific time, then a user located in Europe would understand that time differently than a user located in USA while both may understand the time incorrectly if the Ucommerce Connector was installed in some server located in Asia. Because of this issue the Ucommerce Connector will report all times in UTC time which is the same regardless where user is located or where the Ucommerce Connector is installed.

The use of UTC or local time based on Ucommerce Connector or its add-on application or service.

Application / Service	Module	Time format
Ucommerce Connector Console application Windows service	Log file	UTC
	Log in database	UTC
	Reporting SyncDate to Perfion	UTC
Perfion application	SyncDate field for category and for product. Note that SyncDate field will be always updated to UTC time from Ucommerce Connector, but user can also specify the local time (not recommended). The Ucommerce Connector and Cache Manager will both read the dates defined in SyncDate fields in Perfion in order to determine when the data has to be synchronized and in case the date in Perfion is defined in a local time, then the Connector and Cache Manager will read those dates as local dates in their own time zones. In case the Perfion application is in different time zone than where the Connector and Cache Manager is running from, the synchronization issues may occur. Therefore, it is recommended to always use the UTC time.	UTC / Local
Cache Manager	Log file	UTC
Perfion Connector app	Log search ‘from’ and ‘to’ dates. Note that user can search using both time formats, but results will always be shown in the local time format.	UTC / Local
Perfion Connector app	Log search results	Local
Ucommerce Connector Controller Web Service	It does not have any relation to time

1 What Is UTC Time
2 UTC Time Use