Getting a list of time zones in Java and Seam

If you are building a web application with a user-interface for editing dates that supports time zones, then you are going to need a list of time zones. You need this if you want to edit or display times in 'local time' and store them as UTC (universal time). This article shows the Java code and a handy Seam component that provides the list.

Get a time zone list from `java.util.TimeZone`

In principle, you just get your list of time zones from java.util.TimeZone like this:

final String[] timeZoneIds = TimeZone.getAvailableIDs();

You can pass each ID to TimeZone.getTimeZone(String id) to get a list of TimeZone objects.

final List<TimeZone> timeZones = new ArrayList<TimeZone>();
for (final String id : timeZoneIds) {
   timeZones.add(TimeZone.getTimeZone(id));
}

However, there are a few small details to take care of.

Filter the list

First, the list contains a lot of duplication since there is more than one kind of ID for the same time zone:

city names, like Europe/Amsterdam
three-letter codes, including unfamiliar ones like WET (Western European Time)
a handful of country names, like Egypt
GMT offsets, like Etc/GMT+2
other random entries, like SystemV/EST5.

Taking a cue from existing user-interfaces, like the OS X time zone selector, we shall filter the list to the first format - continent and city - using a regular expression:

^(Africa|America|Asia|Atlantic|Australia|Europe|Indian|Pacific)/.*

Sort the list

Second, TimeZone.getAvailableIDs() returns an unsorted list, so we will sort the result by ID.

Collections.sort(timeZones, new Comparator<TimeZone>() {
   public int compare(final TimeZone a, final TimeZone b) {
      return a.getID().compareTo(b.getID());
   }
});

TimeZones Seam component

Seam includes a built-in Seam component called org.jboss.seam.international.timezoneSelector for setting the 'Seam timezone', which is stored in a session-scoped component called org.jboss.seam.international.timezone. However, there is no component that provides a list of time zones. It therefore makes sense to package the code above as a separate Seam component, as follows.

import java.util.*;

import org.jboss.seam.ScopeType;
import org.jboss.seam.annotations.Name;
import org.jboss.seam.annotations.Scope;
import org.jboss.seam.annotations.Unwrap;

/**
 * Seam component that provides a list of time zones, limited to time zones
 * with IDs in the form Continent/Place, excluding deprecated three-letter
 * time zone IDs. The time zones returned have a fixed offset from UTC,
 * which takes daylight savings time into account. For example,
 * Europe/Amsterdam is UTC+1; in winter this is GMT+1 and in summer GMT+2.
 */
@Scope(ScopeType.APPLICATION)
@Name("timeZones")
public class TimeZones {

   private static final String TIMEZONE_ID_PREFIXES =
      "^(Africa|America|Asia|Atlantic|Australia|Europe|Indian|Pacific)/.*";

   private List<TimeZone> timeZones = null;

   @Unwrap
   public List<TimeZone> getTimeZones() {
      if (timeZones == null) {
         initTimeZones();
      }
      return timeZones;
   }

   private void initTimeZones() {
      timeZones = new ArrayList<TimeZone>();
      final String[] timeZoneIds = TimeZone.getAvailableIDs();
      for (final String id : timeZoneIds) {
         if (id.matches(TIMEZONE_ID_PREFIXES)) {
            timeZones.add(TimeZone.getTimeZone(id));
         }
      }
      Collections.sort(timeZones, new Comparator<TimeZone>() {
         public int compare(final TimeZone a, final TimeZone b) {
            return a.getID().compareTo(b.getID());
         }
      });
   }
}

Output an HTML time zone selector

In a Seam application, we can add the time zones to an HTML SELECT by outjecting the timeZones list and using the following mark-up:

<option jsfc="s:selectItems" value="#{timeZones}" var="tz" label="#{tz.ID} - #{tz.displayName}"/>

This adds each time zone as its ID followed by a dash and the time zone’s display name, and looks like this:

HTML select screenshot

Shorten the two long names

The HTML SELECT ends up being quite wide, because there are two particularly long time zone display names:

Australia/Broken_Hill - Central Standard Time (South Australia/New South Wales)
Australia/Yancowinna - Central Standard Time (South Australia/New South Wales)

If you want to save space, you can just abbreviate these two names using JSTL:

<option jsfc="s:selectItems" value="#{timeZones}" var="tz"
label="#{tz.ID} - #{fn:replace(tz.displayName, '\\(South Australia/New South Wales\\)', '(SA/NSW)')}"/>

which makes the SELECT less wide: