How To Determine Client TimeZone In A Web Application

In web applications when client and server located in different timezones we need a way to determine client timezone to display date/time sensitive information. This is almost always true for Google Appengine, where default server time zone is UTC.

There are several ways to determine client timezone.

One of them is resolving client IP address to location:

1. Get client IP


2. Get client location (latitude, longitude) by the IP-address


3. Get information about timezone by the location coordinates

Every web framework provides API to get client IP. For instance, in java there is a method ServletRequest.getRemoteAddr() for this purpose.

To resolve IP and location information you can use one of the numerous web services available online.

For instance, to resolve IP to location Ping Service uses IP-whois.net service.

Another service, Geonames.org provides web service API to get timezone information by latitude/longitude pair.

Here's an implementation of described approach in java:

    private TimeZone getTimeZoneByClientIP() {
        TimeZone timeZone = UTC_TIME_ZONE;
        
        try {
            String clientIP = globals.getHTTPServletRequest().getRemoteAddr();
            
            if (!Utils.isNullOrEmpty(clientIP)) {
                Location location = locationResolver.resolveLocation(clientIP);
                
                if (!location.isEmpty()) {
                    timeZone = timeZoneResolver.resolveTimeZone(location.getLatitude(), location.getLongitude());
                }
                
                if (timeZone == null) {
                    timeZone = UTC_TIME_ZONE;
                }
            }
            
            logger.debug("Resolved timeZoneId is {}", timeZone.getID());
        } catch (Exception e) {
            logger.error("Error resolving client timezone by ip " 
                    + globals.getHTTPServletRequest().getRemoteAddr(), e);
        }
        
        return timeZone;
    }

The disadvantages using this approach are:

• Your code becomes dependent on third party online services that are not 100% reliable


• Requesting third party services online will take time (up to several seconds) which may result in long response time

Note: according to Ping Service statistics IP-Whois.net availability is close to 100% with average response time ~270 ms, while Geonames.org availability is only around 80% with average response time ~1100 ms. Geonames.org low level availability is due to GAE hosting: Geonames.org restricts free access to its API to 3000 requests per IP per hour.

On the other hand you have really simple solution to implement that allows to determine client timezone at the very first client request so you can display all date/time sensitive data using client local time.

See also:

• DISCUSSION: Time zones and date selection


• Ping Service implementation of described approach




• IPWhoisNetLocationResolver.java


• GeonamesTimeZoneResolver.java

Update: GAE 1.6.5 introduces some request headers which already contains Lat/Lng pair for incoming request: https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/java/runtime#Request_Headers