Publish a feature service with a preferred time zone

Summary

As of ArcGIS Pro 2.7 and the December 2020 release of ArcGIS Online, it is possible to set a preferred time zone on a feature service with date fields. This alleviates the issue where date fields in a feature service appear in a different time zone when consumed in ArcGIS Pro compared to ArcGIS Online.

Procedure

The preferred time zone must be set on the service after it is published. To do so, add the preferredTimeReference parameter in the service definition following the steps below:

1. Navigate to the updateDefinition operation at the feature service's admin endpoint. The URL is of the format:

https://<adminservicecatalog-url>/services/<serviceName>/FeatureServer/updateDefinition

Note:
Appending a token at the end of the URL may be required.

2. Remove everything from the text box
3. Copy and paste the following text to set the time zone for the service to Pacific Standard Time:

{ 
  "preferredTimeReference": { 
    "timeZone": "Pacific Standard Time", 
    "respectsDaylightSaving": true 
  } 
}

Note:
To set the time zone to a different zone, use the appropriate "Name of Time Zone" string from the Microsoft Time Zone Index Values.

4. Click Update Layer Definition.