Below is a screen shot I took showing the CurrentDateTime for a gateway. On the left is from a VNC session which I'm running designer directly on the Linux PC with the gateway installed (Ignition 8.1). On the right is running designer from my PC, which is in a different timezone. Since I'm looking at the tag for Gateway\CurrentDateTime, shouldn't they be the same?
No. It's confusing, but the value of the tag is the same - it's an instance of the java.util.Date class which represents a single instant in time, which will always be the same, to everyone, regardless of timezone.
However, for presentation, the Designer automatically converts it into a 'localized' string format. For complicated legacy reasons, the designer mostly listens to what Vision's timezone related behavior is set to for this formatting operation.
If you read the actual value of the tag and extract the epoch milliseconds from it, I guarantee they're the same value.
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