Views 3: Event Dates and Timezone

I have installed CiviCRM 4.0.2, Drupal 7.2 and have setup a views to display a list of upcoming events.

The event has a start and end DATE/TIME.

When displaying the view of upcoming events I noticed that the start and end dates were not the same as those specified when creating the event. After some searching the forums I have found that it is a timezone issue and have found an issue with civicrm_handler_field_datetime.inc in the way it does some date manipulation.

In the civicrm_handler_field_datetime.inc file the Drupal timezone is retrieved.

// get default time zone form Drupal
$timezone = variable_get('date_default_timezone', 0);

This value is subtracted later on from the UTC equivalent timestamp.
$value = $value - $timezone;

Now date_default_timezone can be a string such as Australia/Sydney which is not an integer.

So the returned timestamp is the event DATETIME converted to UTC. From what I can tell, views expects the timestamp to correspond to the drupal system timezone.

I'm still working out how to fix this and will post my findings soon.