How does NuGenesis LMS handle timestamps? - WKB69007

ENVIRONMENT

• NuGenesis 9 LMS
• NuGenesis 8 LMS
• NuGenesis 8 ELN

ANSWER

LMS stores all date/time stamps in the database in UTC time. The LMS client translates the UTC time to the local time zone for timestamps displayed in the document editor, Sample Management, instrument/reagent inventories, and so on. One exception is the audit trail reports. The built-in audit trail reports – the ones that produce HTML files – report the timestamps as UTC and the report includes a note about UTC in the footer. Jasper reports, whether built-in or custom, can show timestamps in either UTC or the local time zone. It is up to the report author to choose UTC or local time.

The "Document with Audit Trail" report is another exception. It is a Jasper report template that appends the document audit trail to the document report. This template uses UTC+01:00 for timestamps, which results in timestamps being one hour off from the main document audit trail report.

When the LMS client converts a UTC timestamp to local time, it uses the time zone set within the OS where eln.exe is running. This time zone may or may not match the user’s client PC time zone if they use LMS through Citrix or Remote Desktop. In those cases, the local time zone would be the OS time zone on the Citrix/remote desktop machine. For Jasper reports, the local time zone would be the time zone of the LMS server, because that is where the Jasper Reports software runs, which again may or may not match the user’s time zone. In fact, in a global deployment of NuGenesis, it likely won’t match the user’s time zone unless they are at the same site as the servers.

Similarly, LMS uses the date/time formats as set in the OS to display date/time stamps in the application.  Specifically, it uses the "Short date" and "Long time" settings in the OS, which can be found in the Settings app \ Time & Language \ Date & time \ Date, time & regional formatting \ Change data formats.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

The client date/time (Or Citrix Server Date/Time in the case of Citrix connection) is used for every manual action in NuGenesis LMS. 

The one exception is where a background process performs an action—for example the Document Creator Service. In that case, the date/time of the server where Document Creator Service (DCS) is running is then used.

If a user creates a document, the source of the doc creation time stamp is the system clock on the machine where eln.exe is running, which could be on their PC or on Citrix server, as applicable. If the DCS creates a document, the source of the doc creation time stamp is the system clock on the DCS server.

All dates/times are stored in the database as UTC. The LMS client converts the UTC timestamps from the DB into local time. It performs this conversion when a user does something to trigger a data load from the database, such as opening a document. It pulls the UTC timestamps for the document from the DB, converts to local time, and displays the converted timestamp in the client.

When it does the conversion from UTC to local time, the client uses the time zone in Windows where eln.exe is running. That time zone may be different from what is expected. For example, if the users run LMS via Citrix and the citrix server is hosted in another country, then the time zones will use the UTC offset from the Citrix server's clock, not from the user's PC.