How Labview Manage Daylight Saving Time (DST)?

Updated Mar 19, 2021

Reported In

Software

  • LabVIEW

Issue Details

What happens to the gap or overlap when daylight savings starts or ends?
How LabVIEW manage DST?

Solution

Internally LabVIEW stores time in UTC (No DST). It'll convert as necessary for display.

It'll do the conversion (and the initial conversion to UTC) based on the operative system settings. 

If the operative system time changes LabVIEW will follow that change. 

Any special handling that needs to be done to account for DST needs to be handled by the developer, like having ordered IDs for the database entries and tracking themselves whether DST was active during the timestamp.

Note: In order to avoid DST time change issues a common practice is to store timestamps as UTC and localize the time during reporting or display as necessary.