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Parsing of Date/Time/Datetime in bindings #66
Description
It appears the generated parsing code is incorrect with regards to the parsing of xs:date, xs:time, and xs:datetime in the bindings API of python-maec 4.1.0.9. The attributes are actually python strings instead of python datetime.
As an example of the source of this, the parsing of the 'start_datetime' attribute on the AnalysisType complexType is handled as follows:
value = find_attr_value_('start_datetime', node)
if value is not None and 'start_datetime' not in already_processed:
already_processed.add('start_datetime')
try:
self.start_datetime = value
except ValueError, exp:
raise ValueError('Bad date-time attribute (start_datetime): %s' % exp)
but should be handled as follows, as is done in the handling of equivalent types in the python-stix Bindings API:
value = find_attr_value_('timestamp', node)
if value is not None and 'timestamp' not in already_processed:
already_processed.add('timestamp')
try:
self.timestamp = self.gds_parse_datetime(value, node, 'timestamp')
except ValueError, exp:
raise ValueError('Bad date-time attribute (timestamp): %s' % exp)
The issue is the 'value' returned from find-attr_value is a python string and needs to be converted to a datetime object by calling self.gds_parse_datetime(). Given that self.gds_validate_datetime() wasn't called nor was self.gds_parse_datetime() was call and yet there is exception handling, it appears as if the parsing code was modified.
Activity
ikiril01 commentedon Feb 25, 2015
@CyberDaedalus00 thanks for reporting this! You're right in that we modified the parsing code to remove the gds_parse_datetime usage; its been a while, but I believe it was because it caused issues when dumping parsed MAEC XML documents as JSON:
0d844b6
I'm going to do some further testing to see if this is still an issue.
ikiril01 commentedon Feb 25, 2015
This is related to the CybOX issue I linked to above. Once we have consensus on the solution, we may able to revert the bindings to function as before.
gtback commentedon Feb 26, 2015
@ikiril01: I believe that the commit you reference has the effect of treating dates parsed from XML as strings rather than date-times. I don't think that's we want to work with them in the Python APIs; better to use the Python datetime class.