Timezone CFC

What

CFC & function to help you convert a time from a timezone to another timezone

Why

For Adobe ColdFusion or very early version of Lucee

Because Adobe ColdFusion lack a proper timezone date time calculation builtin function, you can use this CFC to help you.

You don't need this for Lucee v4.5 and up

In Lucee, DateTimeFormat() and ParseDateTime() functions support a timezone argument and you can acheive the conversion by:

  // Convert a server time (as it is on server timezone) to London time
  londonTime = DateTimeFormat( now(), "yyyy-mm-dd HH:nn:ss", "Europe/London" );

  // Convert a time as it is on London timezone to a time on server timezone (assume server timezone is New_York)
  serverTime = ParseDateTime( date="2025-10-11 13:17:30", timezone="Europe/London" ) // result is {ts '2025-10-11 08:17:30'}

How

• timezone.cfc - A CFC provides timezone information and convert date/time between timezones, originally developed by Paul Hastings ([email protected])
• timezone.sql - A sql dump file consists of the common timezones we usually find in a application dropdown or operating system settings (the full timezone list in JAVA is too much)

Convert date/time from server timezone to UTC

If we want to set the created date / updated date of a database record in UTC, we can get the UTC time by using the builtin CF function DateConvert

  utc_now = DateConvert( "local2Utc", now() );
  record.setValue("createdAt", utc_now);

Or we can use the MySQL function UTC_TIMESTAMP

  SET createdAt = UTC_TIMESTAMP()

Convert date/time from UTC to a Timezone

Now database record's createdAt is stored in UTC timestamp, to display the date/time in a particular timezone, use the function CastFromUTC

  tz = createObject("component","timezone");
  timezoneTime = tz.CastFromUTC( record.getValue("createdAt"), "US/Eastern" );
  writeoutput( "The record is created on #timezoneTime# (US/Eastern time)" );

Convert date/time from server timezone to a Timezone

The function CastFromServer is the one to use. Useful when you want to convert now() (the current time at the server timezone) to a date/time in a particular timezone

  tz = createObject("component","timezone");
  timezoneNow = tz.CastFromServer( now(), "US/Eastern" );
  writeoutput( "The time now in US/Eastern is #timezoneNow#" );

Timezone info

What we can get from using timezone.cfc, the timezones are from timezone.sql