Cinder API doesn't report time zone info

[Cory Stone]

Dates displayed in Cinder don't have tz info.

| created_at | 2014-03-06T20:37:03.000000 |

Dates from Nova seem to.

| created | 2014-03-06T20:36:55Z |

[Qiang Zhang (strony-zhang)]

Hi Cory, it seems that the same codes about time format below are used in almost each openstack component.

Take the cinder for an example, in cinder/openstack/common/timeutiles.py
# ISO 8601 extended time format with microseconds
_ISO8601_TIME_FORMAT_SUBSECOND = '%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S.%f'
_ISO8601_TIME_FORMAT = '%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S'
PERFECT_TIME_FORMAT = _ISO8601_TIME_FORMAT_SUBSECOND

"| created_at | 2014-03-06T20:37:03.000000 |" is the former.
"| created | 2014-03-06T20:36:55Z |" seems to be the latter.

Do you expect the dates displayed in cinder should be the latter or other format?

[Cory Stone (corystone)]

Neither of those formats include the tz. I don't have a strong preference for whether or not subseconds are included.

It looks like the tz is manually appended by the isotime function in cinder/openstack/common/timeutils.py. I think the views for cinder don't do any conversion from the raw model, while it looks like nova does:

"created": timeutils.isotime(instance["created_at"]),

vs in cinder:

'created_at': volume.get('created_at'),

Cory

[Qiang Zhang (strony-zhang)]

Hi Cory,

The current timeutils.isotime function cannot make the tz added in the API, 'created_at' or 'created‘, because the 'UTC' is set in the isotime function.
"
tz = at.tzinfo.tzname(None) if at.tzinfo else 'UTC'
"
No tzname is specified, so the 'UTC' is the default tz.

Obviously, 'UTC' can make the timezone consistent within openstack. But, if I understand you correctly, you might expect that user-specified local timezone should be displayed to users in the APIs. If so, I agree with you. The timeutils module should provide an optional layer to convert the UTC into user local timezone according to the time_zone info users specified in the conf file. So far, the TIME_ZONE seems to be only set in the horizon or openstack-dashboard/local_settings.

Thanks,
Strony

[Cory Stone (corystone)]

I think there's some confusion here. I don't care *what* the timezone is. I just want the API to return ANY timezone so consumers have the ability to convert to other timezones. By omitting it, is the user supposed to just *guess* that the timezone is UTC?

[Qiang Zhang (strony-zhang)]

If the 'created_at' is the UTC time, the isotime funtion will returns a datetime with the suffix 'Z'. Then parse_isotime will return a datetime with timezone info.
For example:
isotime returns: 2014-04-03T17:29:12.086998Z
parse_isotime returns: 2014-04-03 17:29:12.086998+00:00 <-- this should be what you expect. Right?

But the problem now is that the 'created_at' in cinder is not the UTC datetime.
'created_at': volume.get('created_at')
So the isotime cannot append 'Z' into the datetime and parse_isotime cannot add the timezone in it, either.

[Mike Perez (thingee)]

I'm not sure where this discussion is going, but I think we agree we should call timeutils.isotime(). Currently it's only being used in the limits controller.

[Cory Stone (corystone)]

The bug I'm reporting is that the times we display in the API do not have a time zone associated with them.

If we called isotime on the times from the db, we would get them marked with a default UTC (Z) time zone, which is what should happen, since they're UTC times internally.

Cory

[OpenStack Infra (hudson-openstack)]

Fix proposed to branch: master
Review: https://review.openstack.org/156552

[Duncan Thomas (duncan-thomas)]

So it looks like all dates returned by cinder are UTC, always. There are a couple of migrations that use date.now rather than date.utcnow that should probably be fixed, and we should add a hacking check to remove all use of date.now.

Other than that, out best bet for the V1/V2 APIs is to just document the fact it is always UTC - any change to the date format in the output is an API breakage.

If/when we do a V3 api, we can revisit - hopefully there'll be some good guidance from the API working group on the subject by then

[OpenStack Infra (hudson-openstack)]

Related fix proposed to branch: master
Review: https://review.openstack.org/159854

[OpenStack Infra (hudson-openstack)]

Change abandoned by Yuriy Nesenenko (<email address hidden>) on branch: master
Review: https://review.openstack.org/156552
Reason: As it was discussed on the API-WG and Cinder meeting, these change doesn't need. Cinder API returns an UTC time.

[OpenStack Infra (hudson-openstack)]

Reviewed: https://review.openstack.org/159854
Committed: https://git.openstack.org/cgit/openstack/cinder/commit/?id=931c34d38b1839bd48500055fff9003f4885143d
Submitter: Jenkins
Branch: master

commit 931c34d38b1839bd48500055fff9003f4885143d
Author: Yuriy Nesenenko <email address hidden>
Date: Fri Feb 27 16:06:03 2015 +0200

    Change datetime.now() to timeutils.utcnow() from oslo_utils

    We use an UTC time to avoid the difference with time zones.

    Change-Id: I15aa3b5d3337b90ccdcc6c4ac5d3c7d78108fe21
    Related-Bug: #1288979

[Sean McGinnis (sean-mcginnis)]

Unassigning due to no activity for > 6 months.