Description

I am using an API which returns a json response with dates according to format: RFC3339.

Example json response with date in UTC timezone:

{"orderDate":"2025-01-01T12:12:12+00:00"}

An example model I denormalize to:

class Order {
    #[Context([DateTimeNormalizer::TIMEZONE_KEY => 'Europe/Amsterdam'])]
    public DateTimeImmutable $orderDate;
}

The problem:

The DateTimeNormalizer nicely denormalizes this to my Order object with orderDate as DateTimeImmutable class. However my expectation was that the DateTimeImmutable had the timezone Europe/Amsterdam instead of UTC.

After a bit of digging I found out that inside the DateTimeNormalizer the following is executed during denormalization:

DateTimeImmutable::createFromFormat(\DateTimeInterface::RFC3339, "2025-01-01T12:12:12+00:00", new DateTimeZone('Europe/Amsterdam'));

This creates a DateTimeImmutable object in the timezone of the date-string and ignores the specified timezone. From the php.net documentation this is expected behaviour. However from the available normalization options this was a bit confusing.

The solution ( ? )

After some more researching I found this closed issue #31232 and PR #31256 which seems to address this issue. The PR provides a key PRESERVE_CONTEXT_TIMEZONE which sets the denormalized DateTime object to the timezone specified by the TIMEZONE_KEY. However this PR seems to be closed with the comment: "5.1 provides more flexibility", but I can't really find a solution to my problem.

Any objections again if I create a similar PR which adds the PRESERVE_CONTEXT_TIMEZONE context key?

Example

No response