UserLocal – Nishant Rana's Weblog

While validating some Dynamics 365 Field Service data recently, we came across an interesting scenario where SQL4CDS and Advanced Find returned different record counts even though the date filters appeared to be identical.

At first glance it was surprising to see different record counts being returned despite using what appeared to be the same date range. After investigating further, we found that the difference was related to time zone handling and the behavior of User Local date fields.

In this post, we’ll walk through the issue, explain why it happens, and show how to get matching results between Advanced Find and SQL4CDS.

The Scenario

We had a user in Auckland, New Zealand running the following Advanced Find query against Work Orders.

Date Window Start

On or After 01/01/2026
On or Before 02/01/2026

Advanced Find returned:

5,755 records

The generated FetchXML looked like this:

To validate the result, we ran the following query in SQL4CDS:

SELECT COUNT(*)
FROM msdyn_workorder
WHERE msdyn_datewindowstart >= ‘2026-01-01 00:00:00’
AND msdyn_datewindowstart <= ‘2026-01-02 00:00:00’;

The results were unexpected.

Query Method	Time Zone Used	Result
Advanced Find (Auckland User)	Auckland (NZDT)	5,755
SQL4CDS	UTC Mode	3,027
SQL4CDS	Local Mode (India)	3,026

At this point, it was clear that Advanced Find and SQL4CDS were evaluating different date boundaries, even though the filters appeared very similar. The next step was to understand why.

Understanding the Date Window Start Field

The key detail was the configuration of the Date Window Start field.

The Date Window Start field is configured as a Date Only field with User Local behavior.

Although users only see a date value, Dataverse stores an underlying UTC datetime value and performs time zone conversion based on the user’s personal settings.

To better understand what was happening, we queried some of the underlying values directly.

SELECT msdyn_workorderid,
msdyn_datewindowstart
FROM msdyn_workorder
WHERE msdyn_datewindowstart >= ‘2026-01-01 00:00:00’
AND msdyn_datewindowstart <= ‘2026-01-02 00:00:00’;

When running SQL4CDS in UTC mode, many records had values such as:

2026-01-01 11:00:00

This initially looked unusual because users only see a date value in the application.

However, the explanation becomes clear when we consider the Auckland user’s time zone.

In January, Auckland operates on New Zealand Daylight Time (NZDT), which is UTC+13.

For a User Local Date Only field, Dataverse converts the user’s local date into UTC before storing it.

Date Seen by Auckland User	Stored UTC Value
01-Jan-2026	31-Dec-2025 11:00 UTC
02-Jan-2026	01-Jan-2026 11:00 UTC
03-Jan-2026	02-Jan-2026 11:00 UTC

This explains why so many records appear with a value of 11:00 UTC when viewed in SQL4CDS running in UTC mode.

Why Advanced Find Returned More Records

When the Auckland user enters:

01/01/2026
to
02/01/2026

Advanced Find interprets those dates using the user’s personal time zone.

The actual UTC boundaries become:

>= 2025-12-31 11:00:00 UTC
< 2026-01-02 11:00:00 UTC

This represents two complete calendar days for the Auckland user.

Our original SQL4CDS query was searching a different range entirely:

>= 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC
<= 2026-01-02 00:00:00 UTC

Although the dates appear similar, the actual UTC boundaries are very different.

Finding the Correct SQL4CDS Query in UTC Mode

To reproduce the Advanced Find results, we converted the Auckland user’s date range into UTC and updated the SQL4CDS query accordingly.

SELECT COUNT(*)
FROM msdyn_workorder
WHERE msdyn_datewindowstart >= ‘2025-12-31 11:00:00’
AND msdyn_datewindowstart < ‘2026-01-02 11:00:00’;

This returned:

5,755 records

which matched Advanced Find exactly.

What If SQL4CDS Is Running in Local Mode?

The example above used SQL4CDS running in UTC mode. However, SQL4CDS can also be configured to use Local Time mode.

In our scenario, SQL4CDS was running on a machine configured for India Standard Time (IST), which is UTC+5:30.

To match the Advanced Find results in Local Mode, we need to convert the Auckland UTC boundaries into the local time zone used by SQL4CDS.

Earlier we determined that the Auckland user’s date range:

01-Jan-2026 to 02-Jan-2026

corresponds to the following UTC boundaries:

31-Dec-2025 11:00 UTC
to
02-Jan-2026 11:00 UTC

When SQL4CDS is running in Local Mode on an India machine, those UTC values need to be converted to IST.

UTC Boundary	IST Boundary
31-Dec-2025 11:00 UTC	31-Dec-2025 16:30 IST
02-Jan-2026 11:00 UTC	02-Jan-2026 16:30 IST

The equivalent SQL4CDS query becomes:

SELECT COUNT(*)
FROM msdyn_workorder
WHERE msdyn_datewindowstart >= ‘2025-12-31 16:30:00’
AND msdyn_datewindowstart < ‘2026-01-02 16:30:00’;

This query also returned:

5,755 records

matching Advanced Find exactly.

The results can now be summarized as follows:

Validation Method	Query Boundary	Result
Advanced Find (Auckland User)	User Time Zone	5,755
SQL4CDS UTC Mode	31-Dec-2025 11:00 UTC → 02-Jan-2026 11:00 UTC	5,755
SQL4CDS Local Mode (India)	31-Dec-2025 16:30 IST → 02-Jan-2026 16:30 IST	5,755

References

For a deeper understanding of how SQL4CDS handles date and time values, I highly recommend Mark Carrington’s article:

https://markcarrington.dev/2021/05/21/date-time-handling-in-sql-4-cds

This article explains how SQL4CDS interprets date and time values in both UTC and Local Time modes and was a useful reference while investigating this scenario.

Key Takeaways

The investigation highlighted that there may be three different time zones involved when validating results:

The Dataverse user’s personal time zone used by Advanced Find.
The SQL4CDS Local Time setting.
UTC when SQL4CDS is configured to use UTC mode.

Even when the same date values are entered, the actual UTC range being queried may be different.

For the most reliable comparison:

Identify the time zone of the user who ran Advanced Find.
Convert the date boundaries to UTC.
Run SQL4CDS in UTC mode.
Use explicit UTC values in your query.

We also recommend using an exclusive upper boundary:

WHERE Field >= StartBoundaryUTC
AND Field < EndBoundaryUTC

instead of:

WHERE Field <= EndOfDay

This avoids potential issues with milliseconds and provides more predictable results.

SQL4CDS can match Advanced Find in either UTC Mode or Local Mode. The important requirement is that the date boundaries represent the same moment in time. We generally prefer UTC Mode because the query behaves consistently regardless of the machine or user executing it.

Hope it helps..

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In our Dataverse environment, we had a field named custom_sampledate configured as a DateOnly type with User Local behavior. At some point, we changed its behavior to Time Zone Independent, assuming it would prevent confusion across time zones.

A screenshot of a computer

AI-generated content may be incorrect.

At first glance, everything seemed fine. But over time, users in time zones like New Zealand (NZ) started reporting an issue: for older records created before the change, the dates were now showing up as one day earlier than what they had originally entered.

This was because, when we changed the field’s behavior from User Local to Time Zone Independent, Dataverse stopped interpreting the date based on the user’s local time zone. Instead, it began treating the stored value exactly as-is, which caused trouble for values that were originally entered as User Local, especially from users in forward time zones like NZ.

Dataverse stores DateOnly fields as a datetime behind the scenes, with the time part set to 00:00:00.000. The behavior setting (User Local vs. Time Zone Independent) affects how this raw value is interpreted and displayed. Before the behavior was changed, NZ users (UTC+13/UTC+12) were entering dates into a User Local field. Dataverse automatically converted their local midnight time to UTC when storing it.

For example:

A NZ user enters 2025-04-03
Dataverse stores it as 2025-04-02 11:00:00 UTC

Later, when the field behavior was switched to Time Zone Independent, that same stored value was no longer adjusted for the user’s time zone. It got displayed as is as 2025-04-02 which was one day earlier than intended.

However, the new records entered after the change didn’t show the issue, because after the behavior was set to Time Zone Independent, any newly entered values were saved and displayed exactly as the user typed them—without conversion.

To correct this mismatch without losing data, we followed the below approach:

Created a temporary DateOnly field named custom_sampledate_temp, set to Time Zone Independent behavior.
Copied all values from the existing custom_sampledate field into custom_sampledate_temp.
Deleted the original custom_sampledate field (after backups).
Recreated custom_sampledate with the same schema name, but set it back to User Local behavior.
Copied data back from the temp field into the new custom_sampledate field.
Deleted the temp field after verification.

Also check for more information – https://temmyraharjo.wordpress.com/2024/05/18/dataverse-update-time-zone-adjustment-from-time-zone-independent-to-user-local-and-date-time-behavior/

Changing a DateOnly field from User Local to Time Zone Independent, might look harmless—but it can cause subtle issues, especially across global teams. We need to careful before we make this change, as apart from UI this could result changing the JavaScript, Cloud Flows and Plugins where we have used that field to reflect correct date.

Hope it helps..