Specifying a default time zone for work schedules

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Traditional:
In IBM® Process Portal, the time zone that you specify for work schedules for users or for when activities are due is used to calculate due dates for processes and activities. If you do not specify the time zone, Central Standard Time zone is used as the default. However, you can apply a custom default value in the 100Custom.xml files in IBM Workflow Server, Workflow Center, or both environments.

About this task

The default time zone for work schedules is defined in the default-work-schedule element of the 99Local.xml file. You can retrieve it by using the tw.system.defaultTimeZone JavaScript API string. To customize the default time zone, you can overwrite the default value by adding the following entry to your 100Custom.xml file.

<server>
   <default-work-schedule>         
        <time-zone merge="replace">time_zone_identifier</time-zone>     
   </default-work-schedule>
</server>

Important: Instead of using deprecated three-letter time zone abbreviations, such as CST or MEZ, use unambiguous time zone identifiers such as America/Chicago or Europe/Berlin.

Procedure

To consistently and reliably update the time zone setting for work schedules in all the 100Custom.xml files in your Business Automation Workflow deployment environment, complete the following steps:

Stop the servers for Workflow Server and Workflow Center.
Start the scripting client in disconnected mode as described in the updateBPMConfig command topic.
Run the following commands to simultaneously update all affected servers:
```
wsadmin> AdminTask.updateBPMConfig( [ '-create', '/server' ] )
wsadmin> AdminTask.updateBPMConfig( [ '-create', '/server/default-work-schedule' ] )
wsadmin> AdminTask.updateBPMConfig( [ '-create', '/server/default-work-schedule/time-zone', '-xNodeValue', time_zone_identifier ] )
wsadmin> AdminConfig.save()
```
Replace time_zone_identifier with the time zone that you want. For example, to set the default time zone for work schedules to Chinese Standard Time use Asia/Shanghai for the time zone identifier.
Note: If you use the default time zone and it differs from your system time zone, you might get unexpected results when due dates are calculated or when you use the JavaScript tw.system.calculateBusinessDate() method to calculate business dates.
Restart the servers.

Results

The preferred way of updating the 100Custom.xml files is by running the updateBPMConfig command. However, if the updates are unsuccessful, you can manually update the files by following the steps in Creating a 100Custom.xml configuration file.