How can I save a ISO 8601 UTC date in Datastore with a date and time index

Let's say I have some JSON with an ISO 8610 UTC date as follows:

{
    name: 'Meeting'
    start: '2013-05-14T13:01:00.234Z'
}

How do I save this in Datastore with a date and time index created for the start property ?

I know in the googleapis node module I can create an entity like:

var entity = {
    key: { path: [{ kind: 'Employee' }] },
    properties: {
        name: { stringValue: 'Meeting' },
        start: { dateTimeValue: '2013-05-14T13:01:00.234Z' },
    }
};

But, in gcloud-node, it seems I can only do something like:

{
    name: 'Meeting'
    start: new Date()
}

which gives me a Javascript Date object in local time not a ISO 8601 UTC Date.

@ryanseys

I think what you want is...

{ start: Date.parse('2013-05-14T13:01:00.234Z'); }

or if you use Moment.js:

{ start: moment('2013-05-14T13:01:00.234Z').toDate(); }

/cc @ryanseys As I think he had some docs that explained this, but I don't see them live on the gh-pages hosted site.

@jgeewax

Hi @jgeewax, I don't think that will work as Date gives me a back a Date object in my local timezone (GMT+0100), which is then stored in the Datastore in UTC format.

I want to pass in a UTC date string to begin with using something like moment.utc().toJSON()

    var localTZ = moment('2013-05-14T13:01:00.234Z').toDate();
    console.log(localTZ);  // Tue May 14 2013 14:01:00 GMT+0100 (IST) <- Date Object Local TZ
    console.log(localTZ.toJSON()); // 2013-05-14T13:01:00.234Z <- UTC

    var utc = moment.utc('2013-05-14T13:01:00.234Z'); <- UTC
    console.log(utc.toJSON()); // 2013-05-14T13:01:00.234Z <- UTC

@ryanseys

Hm, I think this is a question of broader scope than gcloud-node...

Any objection to taking this over to Stack Overflow? I think it's probably going to get answered better there.. You effectively need to get a timezone-aware Javascript Date object... I believe that once you have that, gcloud-node will handle it properly, right @ryanseys ?

Yep.

This might be a bug. I'll look into it now.

Nope doesn't look like a bug in our code, we just get the number of milliseconds since the last Epoch using:

var d = new Date(Date.parse('2013-05-14T13:01:00.234Z')); // set start to this object.
d.getTime() // num of milliseconds since epoch - no notion of timezone here

then multiply by 1000 to get microseconds and set that value to timestamp_microseconds_value.

Here's showing that the date is properly parsed as UTC (same as GMT):

> new Date(Date.parse('2013-05-14T13:01:00.234Z'))
Tue May 14 2013 09:01:00 GMT-0400 (EDT)
> new Date(Date.parse('2013-05-14T13:01:00.234Z')).toUTCString()
'Tue, 14 May 2013 13:01:00 GMT'

To answer your original question, try this:

{
    name: 'Meeting'
    start: new Date(Date.parse('2013-05-14T13:01:00.234Z'))
}

@byrneciaran

@byrneciaran any update on whether this helped you?

@byrneciaran

I think we this one is covered, but @byrneciaran, feel free to re-open if it didn't work. Thanks for getting us to double check how we handle dates!

chore: release 5.1.0 (#599)

feat: propagate spanIds (#599)

chore: release 4.1.0 (#608)

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feat: propagate spanIds (#599)

chore: release 4.1.0 (#608)

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How can I save a ISO 8601 UTC date in Datastore with a date and time index #599

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jgeewax commented on May 14, 2015

byrneciaran commented on May 14, 2015

jgeewax commented on May 14, 2015

ryanseys commented on May 14, 2015

ryanseys commented on May 14, 2015

ryanseys commented on May 14, 2015

ryanseys commented on May 14, 2015

ryanseys commented on May 24, 2015

stephenplusplus commented on Jun 4, 2015

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