Get datetime/timestamp from a website/url in android - android

here is what i'am trying to achieve, either one of the two would be ok
Get the date and time from a specific url/website like "www.mywebsite.com"
Get the date and time from my MSSQL Server
either one of the two would be ok, because all i need is to get the same time from the website/server's end, because i'am making an APP Version for the Mobile Website i'am making and i want to show a Clock or Date&Time Reminder in the App
i have no codes working as of now, i tried searching online in search engines and also in stackoverflow but i can't seem to find what i'am looking for, either i'am using the wrong words to search for it or there really isn't any way
the reason why i need the date is because i'am checking when the records inside the database was created and verifying how much time has passed since it was created, it like comparing (CreationDateTime & CurrentDateTime)
i can successfully Display how many hours have passed, i just need the CURRENT PROPER & ACCURATE DATE & TIME of the server :)

I can't help but think this is an XY problem, or at least close to it.
Your client device knows what time it is, because it stays in sync via NTP and whatever network it's attached to (and we already know you're attached to a network because otherwise, this whole thing falls apart). And it knows (or should know) what timezone it's in, so you can translate that to UTC or whatever alternative timezone you might need.
Your server(s) should also be keeping time synced via NTP, so drift between the client and server should be sub-second at worst.
IOW, the time (when corrected to UTC, which all date/time libraries I've used have a method built in to do) will almost always match between your client and server, so why bother with the complexity of "pushing" the current time from server to client?
I'm not seeing why you'd need to do this at all. Have the server tell the client when the reminder is set for, then let the client work out the rest. Anything else would be excessively chatty over the network.

To get the date in the format below, just convert todays date to a string
--07/06/2017
SELECT convert(varchar(10), getdate(), 103)

i have found an alternative answer that works 100% in getting date and time from SERVER instead of URL
SELECT GETDATE() AS CurrentDateAndTime
GETDATE()

Related

Is it good practice to fetch current time from internet?

I am making a mobile application and I need to have the current time. However, I don't want to depend on the user's phone time since it can be changed to whatever they want. Is it a good practice to fetch from a server its local time every minute or similar interval?
P.S: The app will use the time to show if a shop is open or closed so I don't mind about different timezones, I only need the time in the server's timezone.
Depending on the need of the application. If your application would require a connection from the internet, then yes. You can also put that in case there is an issue catching the online time, you can just take the user's time.
From personal experience I never had issues that the user would want to change their phone time, but there have been a few exception.
To use server times is fine. But based on that making decisions on data (shop open/not) is not a good practice. Whenever you make an api call, get the status if its closed or not. This will avoid user side data issues
If you want to show this information on a single shop page, fetch the time difference between current time and closing time from the server. This will help you to maintain the status on app side. this should not be for a very long time. You can use this solution if the difference is less than 10 or 15 mins.

Get TimeZone from internet in Android

I am trying to get time from the device but it returns incorrect time if I change my timezone (Because of the timezone). Is there any way to fetch timezone from the internet so that If a user changes its device timezone it should show the actual real time.
BTW I am using the true time library to get real UTC time.
You can use a publicly available API for this. I use http://ip-api.com/json go thorugh documention before implementation. However if you want you can use other APIs. As I am sure there are many.

Accurate time without sim and without internet

I have an app which is used for collection all day users collecting amount normally offline and then in the evening they uploaded amount online. Sometimes there device date and time is inaccurate so they uploaded wrong data.
At the time of collection my app is getting date and time from the device. Is there any way that app always store accurate date and time without Sim and without the Internet.
You can create a Sqlite Table in application cache when user switch on data,you
can save current server time in that Table and in offline mode you can compare server time with current time. this is the nearest approach to get accurate time
Well, before searching for an app to do this. As a human how can you tell if the date/time is correct without internet?
A possible solution would be a service which counts seconds from the last time the device was connected to the internet (which means it had a correct date/time at that moment) then when you want to add the new amount you can add the seconds to the last time and store this value.
Edit
You will 2 things to achieve this:
BackgroundService
Counter which you can achieve in many ways, I would go the easy way. check this: how-to-measure-elapsed-time
Or you can have an AlarmManager to do this.
One more thing You need to be careful if the device goes off or for some reason, something stopped the service. All of these are user issues and you need to decide how much you want to handle stuff for the user.
You can fix user mistakes by pushing to a SqlLite database every 10~15, but this won't fix if the device went off for hours and then started again at a wrong time - I don't think there is a possible solution for this-.

Android: calculating time away from app

In my app, I'd like to keep track of time away from the app, so that if the user is away for say, 2 hours, and come back, they receive 1 in game currency.
In practice I could easily do this by using a date object to get the current time in onStop, saving that date object, and comparing it to a new date object when they return.
However, I have a feeling this can easily be spoofed by change the internal date settings.
Is there a more secure way? Should I just put a cap on how many hours away you can bank up? I'd love some insight. Thanks as always.
you can try to make more secure code in the app, but the safest way is to request something from a server
if you are app is already using internet permissions consider making an HTTP request to get time.
look at this site for example
http://www.timeapi.org/
if you have backend to support your app that would be extra better
if you are not using internet permissions it might not be worth it to add it just for this, you might consider a different "offline" solution

Retrieving the current date and time from a time server

In my Android app, I would like to retrieve the current date/time (UTC) from some server. Android does have the built-in ability to synchronize the device's date and time with some server but I have found this to be unreliable. Does Google or some other well known service provider provide a simple API that would allow me to retrieve the current date/time? I am not interested in trying to set the date/time on the device (that's not even possible). But I do need to know the correct date in order to perform scheduled tasks that depend on exact dates.
I have seen a device reset its date to something like 1980 when the battery has been removed for an extended period of time and therefore I cannot rely upon the date of the device.
EDIT:
I came across this post:
https://stackoverflow.com/a/13066268/753632
But it requires installing Apache Commons Net. Kind of overkill just to get the time. I don't need to bloat my code more than it already is.
you can refer this link How can I get the "network" time, (from the "Automatic" setting called "Use network-provided values"), NOT the time on the phone?
You could use the calender class, like is explained here, although this uses the time of the device itself. You could also read this it explains how to get the time for the service provider.
I think using the calender and then calculating the UTC time with based on the timezone the phone is in (like this). Because the phone already gets it's time from a server when it is connected to the internet.
I hope this helps.
EDIT: I see you edited your post. So you don't want to use the device time... I think you could look into getting it from the service provider then.

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