[openstack-dev] [nova] Timestamp formats in the REST API

Mark McLoughlin markmc at redhat.com
Tue Apr 29 13:55:33 UTC 2014


On Tue, 2014-04-29 at 14:48 +0100, Mark McLoughlin wrote:

> My conclusions from all that:
> 
>   1) This sucks
> 
>   2) At the very least, we should be clear in our API samples tests 
>      which of the three formats we expect - we should only change the 
>      format used in a given part of the API after considering any 
>      compatibility considerations
> 
>   3) We should unify on a single format in the v3 API - IMHO, we should 
>      be explicit about use of the UTC timezone and we should avoid 
>      including microseconds unless there's a clear use case. In other 
>      words, we should use the 'isotime' format.
> 
>   4) The 'xmltime' format is just a dumb historical mistake and since 
>      XML support is now firmly out of favor, let's not waste time 
>      improving the timestamp situation in XML.
> 
>   5) We should at least consider moving to a single format in the v2 
>      (JSON) API. IMHO, moving from strtime to isotime for fields like 
>      created_at and updated_at would be highly unlikely to cause any 
>      real issues for API users.
> 
> (Following up this email with some patches that I'll link to, but I want
> to link to this email from the patches themselves)

See here:

  https://review.openstack.org/#/q/project:openstack/nova+topic:timestamp-format,n,z

Mark.




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