With the advent of the IoT and the growing need to synchronize automation applications and other TSN (Time Sensitive Networking) use cases UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) is becoming more and more problematic. Currently, there are 37 seconds not accounted for in the TimeStamp Which is stored in UTC. The current I64 portion of the timestamp datatype that holds number of seconds elapsed since 0:00:00 Dec 31, 1900 GMT is simply ignoring Leap Seconds. This is consistent with most modern programming languages and is not a flaw of LabVIEW per se but isn't quite good enough for where the future is heading In fact, there is a joint IERS/IEEE working group on TSN
Enter TAI or International Atomic Time: TAI has the advantage of being contiguous and is based on the SI second making it ideal for IA applications. Unfortunately, a LabVIEW Timestamp cannot be formated in TAI. Entering a time of 23:59:60 31 Dec 2016, a real second that did ocurr, is not allowed. Currently IERS Bulletin C is published to Give the current UTC-TAI offset but, required extensive code to implement the lookup and well, the text.text just won't display properly in a %<>T or %^<>T (local abs time container and UTC Abs time container) We need a %#<>T TAI time container format specifier. (Or soon will!)
"Should be" isn't "Is" -Jay
