Microsoft Teams: get timezone of user? - botframework

Question

I'm developing a bot for MS Teams and I'm looking to know the timezone of a user, to deliver messages at an appropriate time (e.g. not in the middle of the night).
I didn't found something appropriate in the bot framework REST API. Although messages we receive include a 'clientInfo.country' property, which is a start, but definitely not enough to time messages as we would like.

Answer 1

On every message to a user, there is an entities[] collection, one of which is details of the user's locale. For example (copied/pasted from here):
"entities": [
{
"locale": "en-US",
"country": "US",
"platform": "Windows",
"timezone": "America/Los_Angeles",
"type": "clientInfo"
}
],

Answer 2

And the answer is: there’s a localTimestamp property that can be used to get the time offset, which is good enough for what I need.

Answer 3

From #Savageman 's answer
And the answer is: there’s a localTimestamp property that can be used to get the time offset, which is good enough for what I need.
We can solve the issue "NOT Receive the timezone" by mapping the utcOffset of localTimestamp and country in entities to timezone.
I wrote a javascript code to get timezone such as "Asia/shanghai" by using the "localTimestamp": "2019-08-06T18:23:44.259+08:00" and "country": "CN" from Session in Teams message.
More details in my github readme.md.
let moment = require("moment-timezone");
let ct = require("countries-and-timezones");
let partOfSampleSession = {
"message": {
"entities": [
{
"country": "CN",
"locale": "zh-CN",
"platform": "Web",
"type": "clientInfo"
}
],
"localTimestamp": "2019-08-06T18:23:44.259+08:00"
}
}
function getTimezoneFromSession(session) {
// Get the name of country, such as "CN", "JP", "US"
let country = session.message.entities[0].country;
// Get the localTimestamp from message in session, such as "2019-08-06T18:23:44.259+08:00"
let localTimestamp = session.message.localTimestamp;
// Caculate the utfOffset of "localTimestamp", such as "480" by "2019-08-06T18:23:44.259+08:00"
let utcOffsetOfLocalTime = moment().utcOffset(localTimestamp).utcOffset();
// Mapping country to an object array which contains utcOffsets and it's corresponding timezones
// One element from mxTimezones is {"utcOffset": "480", "name": "Asia/Shanghai"}
let mxTimezones = ct.getTimezonesForCountry(country);
// get the same timezone as localtime utcOffset from timezones in a country
let timezone = "";
mxTimezones.forEach(mxTimezone => {
if (mxTimezone.utcOffset == utcOffsetOfLocalTime) {
timezone = mxTimezone.name;
}
});
return timezone;
}
let timezone = getTimezoneFromSession(partOfSampleSession);
// timezone = "Asia/Shanghai"
console.log(timezone);
// example of ct.getTimezonesForCountry("US")
// mxTimezones = [
// {
// "name": "America/New_York",
// "utcOffset": "-300",
// },
// {
// "name": "America/Los_Angeles",
// "utcOffset": "-480",
// }
// ...
// 27 elements
// ...
// ]