Re: ISO 8601 format

You made some excellent points here, and we've implemented a few  
fixes to better accomodate ISO 8601 in general and time zones in  
particular.  See the updated documentation (http://api.evdb.com/docs/ 
events/new) for the current capabilities of the method.
In short, the formats you tried to use should work now, plus some of  
the more common ISO 8601.  It would be difficult to support all the  
formats that 8601 implies, if only because some of them don't  
correspond well to an event start or end time (like "2006").  Let us  
know if you find a format that doesn't work.
I should also note that time zones are handled a bit differently by  
EVDB than they are in the usual calendar application or database.   
The time zone of the event's locale is very important to us, so we  
ask that an Olson path be specified along with the dates.  (This  
becomes more important with recurrence and other situations where the  
same time zone can resolve to different offset values on different  
dates.)  However, if you wish to specify only the offset in the  
datetime string, we'll still assign the right time (in UTC) and try  
to display it correctly on the site.
As an aside, I've added interim documentation for the /events/links/ 
new and /events/comments/new methods.  They're simple enough methods  
that I felt OK about putting those out there before the rest of the  
bunch is done.  Please take a look and let me know if you have any  
questions.
Cheers,
---
Chris Radcliff
EVDB, Inc.
chris-HOCcf+wKLRE@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx


On Oct 26, 2005, at 8:43 AM, B-Talk Support wrote:

> When we try to add an event whose start time is October 14, 2005 at  
> 12:24 pm EST (i.e. -4 hours from UTC) like this:
> http://api.evdb.com/rest/events/new?app_key=...&title=Just+a 
> +Test&start_time=2005-10-14T12:24-04:00
> or like this (this time, without the "T" for time):
>
> http://api.evdb.com/rest/events/new?app_key=...&title=Just+a 
> +Test&start_time=2005-10-14+12:24-04:00
> we get an error (error string="Invalid Datetime Format",  
> description = Month is out of range).
> It's only when we encode the start_time part of the string this way  
> does it work:
> http://api.evdb.com/rest/events/new?app_key=...&title=Just+a 
> +Test&start_time=2005-10-14+12:24
> But, that last formatting is NOT consistent with ISO 8601.
>
> According to this site (http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-datetime):
>
> "The formats are as follows. Exactly the components shown here must  
> be present, with exactly this punctuation. Note that the "T"  
> appears literally in the string, to indicate the beginning of the  
> time element, as specified in ISO 8601.
>    Year:
>       YYYY (eg 1997)
>    Year and month:
>       YYYY-MM (eg 1997-07)
>    Complete date:
>       YYYY-MM-DD (eg 1997-07-16)
>    Complete date plus hours and minutes:
>       YYYY-MM-DDThh:mmTZD (eg 1997-07-16T19:20+01:00)
>    Complete date plus hours, minutes and seconds:
>       YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ssTZD (eg 1997-07-16T19:20:30+01:00)
>    Complete date plus hours, minutes, seconds and a decimal  
> fraction of a
> second
>       YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss.sTZD (eg 1997-07-16T19:20:30.45+01:00)
>
> where:
>
>      YYYY = four-digit year
>      MM   = two-digit month (01=January, etc.)
>      DD   = two-digit day of month (01 through 31)
>      hh   = two digits of hour (00 through 23) (am/pm NOT allowed)
>      mm   = two digits of minute (00 through 59)
>      ss   = two digits of second (00 through 59)
>      s    = one or more digits representing a decimal fraction of a  
> second
>      TZD  = time zone designator (Z or +hh:mm or -hh:mm)"
>
>
> So, our time strings (the first two examples) are correct as far as  
> ISO 8601 goes, but are getting rejected by EVDB.
> We can drop the "T" but what about the time zone?