Getting UTC DateTime from Model attributes

Question

The AttributeType::DateTime in model attributes saves as UTC which is great, but upon getting that attribute I receive a Craft\DateTime object with my server timezone set for it, and thus the time gets modified accordingly.

Is there any way I could force the model to return a Craft\DateTime object with the UTC timezone?

When I created a getter method public function getDate() it doesn't get called when using object.date inside a Twig template. I have to specifically call object.getDate() instead, which isn't really an option for me.

This is how my model defines attributes:

protected function defineAttributes()
{
    return array(
        'date'  => AttributeType::DateTime,
    )
}

Maybe there are some additional rules I can set for it, that I am not aware of? I couldn't find anything in Yii's documentation.

Answer 1

I can't think of a way to automatically tell Craft to do this, but you could write a simple helper method to do this for you:

public static function convertDateTimeToUTC($dateTime)
{
    return $dateTime->setTimezone(new \DateTimeZone('UTC'));
}