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Add newDate date utility function

Coung Ngo requested to merge cngo-add-newdate-function into master

What does this MR do and why?

This MR adds a new date function that basically wraps the Date constuctor to fix a bug when a date-only string yyyy-mm-dd is passed to Date constructor for users behind UTC. For example, the bug results in users in UTC-8 timezone getting a date that is 1 day behind:

new Date('2020-02-02')
// results in Sat Feb 01 2020 16:00:00 GMT-0800 (Pacific Standard Time)

From MDN:

When the time zone offset is absent, date-only forms are interpreted as a UTC time and date-time forms are interpreted as local time. This is due to a historical spec error that was not consistent with ISO 8601 but could not be changed due to web compatibility.

Sentry logging is also added to capture instances where date-only strings are passed to localeDateFormat so we can update theses instances to use newDate().

Follow-up MRs will:

  • Update our frontend guidelines to document this bug and spread awareness (then announce it on the frontend channel/call)
  • Replace newDateAsLocaleTime with this new date function as it does the same thing (I created the newDateAsLocaleTime function but hate the name!)

This is related to a recent regression !162274 (merged)

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How to set up and validate locally

  1. Set timezone of OS to one behind UTC, for example Sacramento California UTC-8 (on macos: System Settings > General > Date & Time > Closest city)
  2. Test by displaying the result of newDate('2022-02-02') anywhere in the UI.
Edited by Coung Ngo

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