Date Picker shows displays wrong timezone after Apex 2.2 upgrade

Question

After upgrading from 2.0 to 2.2, all date pickers in all applications now display the time in GMT instead of GMT - 7.
For example: before upgrade 08/03/2006 9:00 -- after upgrade 08/03/2006 16:00.
The date and time on the server is set to GMT - 7. The database displays GMT - 7 in all other non-Apex apps.
I suspect there's a global preference that needs resetting, but I can't find it.
Cheers,
Jaime

Answer 1

Hi Jaime,
What you are witnessing is a feature and not a bug. Shame on us for not making this change in behavior more prominent. But this feature ultimately emanated from the posting at:
Re: Date Picker and timzone
In Application Express 2.2, if you are using a DatePicker, the current date and time will be computed based upon LOCALTIMESTAMP. LOCALTIMESTAMP is time zone aware. By default, it will use the database's time zone.
To control the user's time zone setting in your application, you could add a before-header application-level process (and, ultimately, another one on Submit) to issue a PL/SQL statement like:
execute immediate 'alter session set time_zone = ''America/New_York'' ';Note:
1) Those are sets of two single-quotes around America/New_York, not double-quotes
2) Obviously, you'd replace America/New_York with your favorite time zone. The full list is at:
http://download-west.oracle.com/docs/cd/B19306_01/server.102/b14225/applocaledata.htm#sthref2012
As a quick demonstration, run the following block in SQL Commands on apex.oracle.com or your favorite APEX instance:
begin
    dbms_output.put_line( 'LocalTimestamp Before: ' || localtimestamp );
    execute immediate 'alter session set time_zone = ''America/New_York'' ';
    dbms_output.put_line( 'LocalTimestamp After: ' || localtimestamp );
end;
/I hope this helps.
Joel