AVKON components

The services provided by AVKON that should be used in application development whenever possible are:

• Editors

• FEP

• Functions handling word boundaries

• Cursor handling

• BiDi functions, see SDK documentation AknBidiTextUtils Class Reference

• Font

• StringLoader.h

• Time and date formatters

• AIF files

• Aknlayout.dll, see SDK documentation AIF Files.

Time stamps showing local time

Since the general system time is set to UTC, and the user always needs to see the local time, any time stamps, like the creation time of a file, need to be converted to local time before showing them to the user. This also takes the daylight savings setting into consideration.

How to do it?

The time stamps themselves must not be touched, but the time needs to be converted before shoving it to the user. For this reason, a new function ConvertUtcTimeToHomeTime is included in AknUtils.h

Example:

namespace AknDateTimeUtils
{
/**
* Converts given UTC time to home time.
* This conversion is used e.g. when showing time stamps of 
* files in UI.
* In Symbian OS file system, time stamps are in UTC time, but 
* in UI they should be shown in home time.
*
* @param aTime UTC time to be converted to home time.
*/
IMPORT_C void ConvertUtcTimeToHomeTime( TTime& aTime );
}

This function can be used to convert from UTC to local time wherever the current time is shown to the user.