Invalid OffsetDateTime comparison accounting for offset differences

[novoj]

There is probably some bug in sending the OffsetDateTime over the wire:

The data in the end looks like that:

And this doesn't work well for the equality comparison although there were correct data at the start of the query.

[novoj]

May be this is not a problem of a client, but the Java Time API itself and the way we use it in evitaDB. See following explanation from chatGPT which we verified manually by our tests. For values:

2024-04-24T11:07:11.677467736Z
2024-04-24T13:07:11.677467736+02:00

Which are logically equal:

---

When you're using OffsetDateTime objects in Java, the compareTo method compares both the instant in time and the offset. So even if two OffsetDateTime objects represent the same moment in time (the same instant), if their offsets are different, they are not considered equal by the compareTo method. This is why you see a -1 instead of 0 when comparing your two dates.

In the case of the timestamps you provided:

• 2024-04-24T11:07:11.677467736Z has an offset of UTC (Z or +00:00).
• 2024-04-24T13:07:11.677467736+02:00 has an offset of +02:00.

Although they represent the same absolute point in time, their offsets differ. According to the OffsetDateTime.compareTo() specification:

Compares this OffsetDateTime with another ensuring that the date-time is ordered before the date-time with a later offset.

This means that an OffsetDateTime with a lesser offset is considered "earlier" than one with a greater offset when their instants are the same, hence the -1 result indicating the first is earlier.

If your goal is to compare only the instants (ignoring the offsets), you should convert these OffsetDateTime objects to Instant as shown previously:

import java.time.OffsetDateTime;
import java.time.Instant;

OffsetDateTime dateTime1 = OffsetDateTime.parse("2024-04-24T11:07:11.677467736Z");
OffsetDateTime dateTime2 = OffsetDateTime.parse("2024-04-24T13:07:11.677467736+02:00");

Instant instant1 = dateTime1.toInstant();
Instant instant2 = dateTime2.toInstant();

int result = instant1.compareTo(instant2);  // This should return 0, indicating equality.

This conversion to Instant ensures that the comparison is based solely on the universal timeline, disregarding any timezone or offset differences.

[novoj]

I think it's not entirely possible to pass the original form of the date time over different protocols from different clients and this may be also the case of evitaLab (waiting for confirmation from @lukashornych).