Status: New
Owner: [email protected]
Labels: Type-Defect Priority-Medium
New issue 324 by Grigand: Feature: Add a new primitive type for a DateTime
format
http://code.google.com/p/protobuf/issues/detail?id=324
Problem Statement:
Protobuffers is lacking in one major way: Date/Time support. Without a
defined standard way of transporting date+time information, we are left
with inventing our own. Then we are required to document how this data is
stored/interpreted. This makes for an ugly public API when 99% of the
interchange format is well defined, and 1% is not.
Frankly it's getting very painful, especially when we use proto-buffers to
define our wire format and convert these proto structures to
json/bson/xml. Both bson and xml require knowledge that the field is of
type date+time. Json, unfortunately, is in the same boat protobuffers is,
and the current 'hack' is using new Date(...). While writing these various
formats we are currently in the position of defining date+time as an Int64
and recognizing it by the field name suffix 'RawDateTime'. Lots of ugly
code, but I think you get the idea of why this is important.
Solution(s):
I am told google transmits date+time as an Int64 offset from the unix epoch
(00:00:00 UTC on 1 January 1970). This would be more than sufficient for
most uses. I also admit there is a whole 'bag of worms' that goes along
with date+time. I'm not interested in solving world hunger, but a simple,
well defined, standard date+time format is a must for many projects. I
really don't care what standard is used, anything is better than nothing at
this point ;)
If you really want to overkill the problem ...
struct DateTime64
{
union {
struct {
sint64 Year : 16; // +/-32767 (16 bits)
uint64 Month : 4; // 1~12 (20 bits)
uint64 Day : 5; // 1~31 (25 bits)
uint64 Hour : 5; // 0~23 (30 bits)
uint64 Minute : 6; // 0~59 (36 bits)
uint64 Second : 6; // 0~59 (42 bits)
uint64 Milli : 10; // 0~999 (52 bits)
uint64 IsDST : 1; // 0~1 (53 bits) - Daylight
Saving Time
sint64 UtcOffset : 11; // -720~840 (64 bits) - UTC offset
minutes
} ;
uint64 Int64;
};
};
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