Time Zone Difference into Booking API Responses
With the 24B update, capacity-related booking operations now includes time zone differences in the response. This feature facilitates the identification of any variations in the time slots for a specific day, considering Daylight Saving Time (DST) changes in the relevant time zone.
Below are various scenarios illustrating the need for integrations to accurately handle time zone changes when validating dates and time slots available for scheduling.
- Companies operating in multiple countries or regions need to ensure that dates and time slots returned are accurately displayed according to the respective time zones assigned to the related capacity area. This helps to avoid confusion for customers or users in different locations.
- Integrations dealing with legal or compliance matters must accurately handle time zone changes for dates returned to meet deadlines or confirm availability without errors or discrepancies.
- Appointment scheduling platforms should account for time zone differences when confirming dates and time slots for appointments booked by users in different regions, ensuring that appointments are scheduled accurately on both ends.
For the capacity areas that have booking options defined, both activityBookingOptions and showBookingGrid API methods responses now contain the 'timeZoneDiff' integer field in addition to timeZone string field.
- timeZoneDiff (optional): integer
Title: Time Zone Diff
Description: The difference between UTC and the resource's local time, displayed in minutes. For example, -180 means that the resource time is 3 hours behind UTC.
Business Benefit
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Improves efficiency in managing bookings across different regions that follow Daylight Saving Time (DST) changes.
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Facilitates integrations with external systems that require mapping the time information according to the ISO 8601 standard for further processing in the booking workflow.
Steps to Enable
Review the REST service definition in the REST API guides to leverage (available from the Oracle Help Center > your apps service area of interest > APIs & Schema). If you are new to Oracle's REST services you may want to begin with the Quick Start section.