[Zope] FW: [Zope] Problems requesting SQL date fields

[F.G. Hoekstra]

>
> Without more info this suggestion is just a shot in the dark, but as Brian
> Hooper wrote a few days ago, here in Tokyo he and I recently had a hell of
> a time with SQL date fields. (If you've already seen his post and it's not
> relevant, apologies - and please disregard the rest of this...)
>
> We had no problem inserting datetime values into MySQL, but when
> requesting
> the values Zope wasn't able to parse them. We finally figured out
> that NT 4
> was returning 'Tokyo Standard Time' as the time zone value, which Zope
> didn't recognize and couldn't deal with. Thus if you're in
> Germany and have
> your system time zone set appropriately, this _may_ be the cause of your
> trouble as well. I've included part of Brian's post below with the fix -
> if, in case, this is the cause of your ills.
>

A few days ago I delved into the DateTime modules and the problem may be
more complicated in Western Europe because

1. neither the DateTime module, nor the DateTimeZone have entries for Middle
European Time (MET, which is the time of most of the countries of the
European Community, including Germany). They have entries for Poland and
GB-Eire and for Japan. The DateTimeZone._data dictionary entries were rather
cryptic (at least to me), which makes it difficult to add one.
2. Depending on the language version of Win95 (which I work with) and
probably W98 and NT as well, a different version of the timezone name:
time.tzname module returns ('W. European Standard Time', 'W. European
Daylight Time') in the English version and something like ('West Europese
Standaardtijd', 'West Europese Zomertijd') in the Dutch version, and
probably something else in the French, German, Spanish etc version.

The result of all this is an empty timezone in the DateTime representation
(DateTime('1999/02/26 09:23:47.4 ')), which makes it unparsable to the
DateTime module.

Hope this makes thing clearer. But I do not know how to solve this. Probably
an entry for MET in the DateTime modules would be the most important step.


Rik Hoekstra

> - Jay
>
> >Brian Hooper <brian@garage.co.jp> wrote:
> >
> >MySQL select queries were mysteriously failing with a parse
> error in RDB.py,
> >related to not being able to parse a DATETIME field.
> >
> >After looking at DateTime.py and concluding that DateTime should
> be able to
> >parse virtually anything ;-), we were initially very puzzled as
> to the cause
> >of the parse error.  However, after eliminating everything else we could
> >think of, we finally found that it was the fact that NT was returning the
> >value 'Tokyo Standard Time' as the timezone for our machine - a
> value which
> >is not listed in the _zmap in DateTime - so, DateTime was failing here:
> >
> >                # Current time, exp in specified timezone
> >                t,tz=time(),self._tzinfo._zmap[lower(arg)]
> >
> >We added the mapping 'tokyo standard time':'Tokyo' to _zmap,
> restarted Zope,
> >and now everything's working fine.