Travelling in Time

You might be aware that the earth is in fact not flat but a globe with lots of time zones spread more or less evenly around its cirumference. There was a time when programmers had to do most of the heavy lifting of times and dates themselves, but luckily Cocoa has some nice classes to take care of the calculations for you.

Here is an example how I would “move” my birth date to the USA. What’s great about it is that it also seems to takes care of daylight savings time. In Austria and Germany this was only introduced 6 years after my birthday, so July 24th in 1974 has timezone GMT+1 whereas July 24th 1984 ends up with GMT+2.

// set up the components to make up my birthday
NSDateComponents *components = [[NSDateComponents alloc] init];
[components setMonth:7];
[components setYear:1974];
[components setDay:24];
[components setHour:12];
[components setMinute:7];
 
// create a calendar
NSCalendar *gregorian = [[NSCalendar alloc]  initWithCalendarIdentifier:NSGregorianCalendar];
 
// default is to use the iPhone's TZ, let's change it to USA
[gregorian setTimeZone:[NSTimeZone timeZoneWithName:@"America/New_York"]];
 
// now we piece it together
NSDate *date74 = [gregorian dateFromComponents:components];
NSLog([date74 description]);  // 1974-07-24 17:07:00 +0100
 
// show the difference the year makes
[components setYear:1984];
NSDate *date84 = [gregorian dateFromComponents:components];
NSLog([date84 description]); // 1984-07-24 18:07:00 +0200
 
// clean up
[components release];
[gregorian release];

Now you might wonder why the output from the NSLog is +0100 and +0200 and not the US timezone. The reason is that Cocoa internally will always automatically convert dates to your current system timezone.

Try it out for yourself? Create a date instance like I have shown above, log it, then change the default timezone for your program and log it again. Even though you did not modify the date instance, you will get a different output.

// components already set up as before
NSDate *date84 = [gregorian dateFromComponents:components];
NSLog([date84 description]); // 1984-07-24 18:07:00 +0200
 
[NSTimeZone setDefaultTimeZone:[NSTimeZone timeZoneWithAbbreviation:@"GMT"]];
NSLog([date84 description]); // 1984-07-24 16:07:00 +0000

So there is lots of date magic (aka “time travel”) available in Cocoa. All you have to get used to is having to write lots of code but you trade this for lots of functionality.

Categories: Recipes