Bug report - OOB site column ArticleStartDate is crawled according to GMT0 not user/server timezone

Question

This issue can be reproduced easily on any SP2013 farm (on-premise) and I heard Sharepoint online do not have this problem.
Issue: Site column "Article Date" with fieldname "ArticleStartDate" is crawled as GMT 0 regardless what timezone your web application, site setting, user setting and OS are set. Also when you submit a search you need to use GMT 0
otherwise you will get wrong result. I believe it is bug because other datetime columns like "Modified" have handled timezone issue very well.
To reproduce: On a SP2013 farm (on-premise), check your timezone settings (in my environment it is GMT+8). Then create a site collection and enable its Publishing Infrastructure feature. Then you will see some site columns are setup including "Article
Date" (field name "ArticleStartDate"). Now create a custom content type and add some columns including "Article Date" to it. Create some sample items using the custom content type and remember fill in the value for "Article Date".
By default it should allow you pick a "Date" only. After save the change you should see "Article Date" is saved like "2014-06-18 00:00:00" if check with powershell.
After create some sample items start a full crawl. You will see find two crawled property "ows_q_DATE_ArticleStartDate" and "ows_ArticleStartDate" appear in Search Service Application -> Search Schema. There are some existing managed
properties mapping to those crawled properties like "ArticleStartDateOWSDATE" (which is TEXT datatype).
Here you can create some new managed property or use existing. Apply search using those properties to test. In my lab, I created "NewsArticleDate" as managed property and mapping to ows_ArticleStartDate. Then I create a blank
page and add a "Search result" and "refinement panel" webpart and start some search. In the refinement panel added in the managed properties setup in previous steps. In the querystring I typed in something like /search.aspx?k=newsarticledate=YYYY/MM/dd
It is what I see:
1. As you can see in the refinement panel, because I am at GMT+8 and crawled index at GMT 0, the sample data "2014-06-18 00:00:00" will become "2014-06-17 16:00:00".
2. Hence, in order to search out "2014-06-18 00:00:00"  item I have to input "2014-06-17" in search query! (in SP2013 the time part are ignored)
3. By using the powershell provided by Ivan Josipovic (http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/office/Get-Crawled-Property-names-9e8fc5e0), I can see the items
ows_ArticleStartDate is "2014-06-18 00:00:00".
I hope it is actually not a bug. Please let me know if my setting is wrong. Thank you!

Answer 1

Hi Mark,
According to your description, my understanding is that the Article Date column displayed with the value based on GMT0 in the Refinement web part.
Microsoft SharePoint stores date and time values in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC, but also named GMT or Zulu) format, and almost all date and time values that are returned by members of the object model are in UTC format. So the value
of the Article Date column stores the date and time in UTC format in the database, and the search indexes the UTC value of the Article Date column after crawling the database so that it displays the UTC value in Refinement web part.
The list column values displayed in the lists that are obtained through the indexer for the SPListItem class are already formatted in the local time for the site so if you’re working on current context list item and fetch a datetime field
like so SPContext.Current.ListItem["Your-DateTime-Field"] you’ll retrieve a DateTime object according the specified time zone in the regional settings.
More references:
http://francoisverbeeck.wordpress.com/2012/05/24/sharepoint-tip-of-the-day-be-careful-when-wor/
Thanks,
Victoria
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Victoria Xia
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