DateTime problem with .NET WebService (orangechicken follow-up)

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wabatson - 27 Jun 2006 01:17 GMT

Back in March, OrangeChicken sent the following response to a developer
who was having problems with DateTime in Flash. We have run into the
same problem. I have two questions

1) Is this truely a bug recognized by Adobe? I have a support call in
and they are slow to respond.
2) In talking to another Flash/.NET developer, he felt you could
modify the componet to handle the date correctly. I'm guessing
changing the code of mx.services.PendingCall.decodeDate(), based on
your response below. Is this possible in your eyes.
3) Also when you reference "use the datatype of date" are you refering
to in .NET or Flash?

Forgive me but I'm not a Flash or .NET developer, but a PM trying to
follow-up on a issue for a client that is using Flash to connect to our
.NET product.

OrangeChicken's response
====================

Hey CI2 - You're one of the few people to mention this bug which I find
weird.

The simplest way to recreate this bug is to access a web service that
returns
at dateTime in the format "2000-01-12T12:13:14Z". Crazy that this bug
exists,
because the W3C's **example** is in that format (see
http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-2/#isoformats). Notice there's no
millisecond.

The bug itself exists in mx.services.PendingCall.decodeDate() where it

*assumes* there's milliseconds. The only way to work around it is to
have your
web service put out a *string* that's in a format Flash can handle (or
use the
datatype of 'date' instead of 'dateTime' if the time isn't important
for your
usage).

That workaround is a hassle because then you have to write parsing
code - bleh.

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wabatson - 27 Jun 2006 01:22 GMT

One follow-up I missed is how our scenario goes.

1) Flash calls .NET Web Service.
2) .NET Web Service passes back a person object that contains a
datetime (with no milliseconds).
3) From my understanding the person object is deserialized/decoded
into a Flash object but does it improperly due to milliseconds missing.
4) The Flash code doesn't expect to do anything with the person object
but turn around and send it back to another web service.
5) When it calls the second web service the Flash code serializes the
object back to SOAP, but since it has an invalid datetime field in the
object it spits out data with a bunch of Not A Number acronyms ( I
believe something like NaN-NaN-Nan.....something)

> Back in March, OrangeChicken sent the following response to a developer
> who was having problems with DateTime in Flash. We have run into the
[quoted text clipped - 39 lines]
> That workaround is a hassle because then you have to write parsing
> code - bleh.

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wabatson - 27 Jun 2006 01:38 GMT

I also just found this link from Adobe that references ActionScript to
parse datetime in the formats that have milliseconds, if I'm reading it
properly. I'm not sure how this would fit in my scenario though. Does
the developer have to parse through each object that comes through
handling the datetime of each object or is this code that is put at a
lower level so that when Flash decodes the SOAP message it handles it
properly?

> One follow-up I missed is how our scenario goes.
>
[quoted text clipped - 53 lines]
> > That workaround is a hassle because then you have to write parsing
> > code - bleh.

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Webmaster Forum / Flash / Data Integration / June 2006

DateTime problem with .NET WebService (orangechicken follow-up)