LEX Online Manual Content

Editor for Date/Time Attributes

This editor is used to show, edit or create LDAP date/time attributes.

Editor for date/time attributes

Attention: No matter if you are just want to display a date and time value or if you have to write a value to the directory: Don't forget that LEX normally adjust the values according to the time zone of your machine. Most LDAP server stores date and time values internally in UTC format: Coordinated Universal Time - this is (almost) the former Greenwich Meantime (GMT).

So if you working an a computer which is in the middle european time zone (UTC+01) and you see the time 3 PM, than this is actually 2 PM in UTC time. So in the server, the value 2 PM is stored, although you see 3 PM in this editor. The same thing in write operations for date and time attributes. If you perform an attribute write operation with this editor with 10 AM, LEX re-calculates this to UTC and writes 9 PM in our example. If you do not want LEX to adjust date and time values to the machine's time zone, you have to go to the Tools - Option - LDAP Settings tab and deactivate the Convert date and time values in local machine time option!

In the top area of this dialog, you see the distinguished name and type icon for the object whose attribute your are editing. In the line beneath, the attribute name is shown.

You see two input fields, one for the Date value, one for the time value - you can easily set the values you want with this. The Set to "Now" button can set automatically the current date and time. To ease the input of dates which could be interesting, the Set to... pulldown menu can set date relative to now:

Setting the date/time value relative to now

Editing the raw value

If you want, you can edit a date and time value as the basic string value - just like it will be stored in the directory. Please remember that this is always an UTC-adjusted date and time (see explanations above).

The value has to be a UTC time string or a generalized time string, depending on the given directory server. The regarding syntaxes for such time strings are described in the RFC 4517 'LDAP Syntaxes and Matching Rules' in section 3.3.13 (Generalized Timestring) and 33.34 (for UTC time strings).

Generalized Time
Attributes with this syntax contain a string which specifies a date and a time value, down to a tenth part of a second, optional with information about the deviation from the coordinated universal time. This generalized time string syntax is conform to the ISO 8601 standard for representation of dates and times.
UTC Time
Attributes with this syntax contain a string which specifies a date and a time value optional with information about the deviation from the coordinated universal time. This time string syntax is conform to the Abstract Syntax Notation One (ASN.1) for dates and times.

Examples for this syntax:

196820100644+0100    6:44 AM, October 20, 1968   (Middle European Time)
200306032015230Z      8:15:30 PM, July 03, 2003    (Coordinated Universal Time)
200912241600-0800     4 PM, December 24, 2009     (Pacific Standard Time)

The difference between generalized time strings and UTC time strings: In generalized time strings, the minutes, seconds and fractions of seconds are optional. In UTC time strings, only the seconds are optional and fractions of seconds are not allowed here. In most directories, servers use time strings which includes minutes and seconds, but no fractions of seconds: So these are conform two both syntaxes.

Generalized time string

When will the date/time value editor will be used?

The date/time editor is used whenever LEX has valid schema information and detects one of the following official attribute syntaxes:

1.3.6.1.4.1.1466.115.121.1.24	Generalized Time
1.3.6.1.4.1.1466.115.121.1.53	UTC Time
2.5.5.11	String(Generalized-Time) {MS}