NIFI-8023 Added toLocalDate() and updated toDate() in DataTypeUtils

[exceptionfactory]

Description of PR

NIFI-8023 Added DataTypeUtils.toLocalDate() method for use in AvroTypeUtil to determine epoch days when logical date types enabled.

Updated DataTypeUtils.toDate() with new parseDate() method that evaluates the format pattern of java.text.SimpleDateFormat to determine whether a Time Zone field Z is present in the pattern. This conditional adjustment is necessary because absence of the Time Zone Field in a java.text.SimpleDateFormat pattern definition produces different results depending on the system time zone configuration.

This approach resolves a latent issue when using the DataTypeUtils.toDate() method to parse a string that does not contain any time zone information. Changes to DataTypeUtils.toDate() and updates to unit tests in referencing classes indicate the expected behavior.

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[turcsanyip]

@exceptionfactory I ran some test flows and there is a regression in ConvertRecord.

ConvertRecord setup:

• Json reader/writer (XML and CSV also affected)
• explicit Avro schema specified with Date logical type
• input date: "1970-01-05"
• expected output: the same date ("1970-01-05")

If I run it in a UTC+ time zone, the output is one day earlier ("1970-01-04").

The other PR on this jira (#4677 by @adenes) has the same issue so I think it needs to be fixed somewhere else in the codebase (I guess where the java.sql.Date value is written from the record to string).

There is one more use case which is not working. This is not a regression and might have never worked but it would be great to fix it also: ExecuteSQLRecord with Json/CSV/XML record writer (the date is one day earlier then in the database if NiFi is running in a UTC+ time zone)

[adenes]

@exceptionfactory , thanks for the PR.

I ran the unit tests in CET timezone, and one of the newly added tests fails:

[ERROR] testFormattedStringToDateWithSystemDefaultZoneId(org.apache.nifi.serialization.record.TestDataTypeUtils)  Time elapsed: 0.007 s  <<< FAILURE!
org.junit.ComparisonFailure: expected:<19[70-01-0]1> but was:<19[69-12-3]1>
	at org.apache.nifi.serialization.record.TestDataTypeUtils.testFormattedStringToDateWithSystemDefaultZoneId(TestDataTypeUtils.java:168)

I'll do some debugging to see what goes wrong.

[exceptionfactory]

@exceptionfactory , thanks for the PR.

I ran the unit tests in CET timezone, and one of the newly added tests fails:

[ERROR] testFormattedStringToDateWithSystemDefaultZoneId(org.apache.nifi.serialization.record.TestDataTypeUtils)  Time elapsed: 0.007 s  <<< FAILURE!
org.junit.ComparisonFailure: expected:<19[70-01-0]1> but was:<19[69-12-3]1>
	at org.apache.nifi.serialization.record.TestDataTypeUtils.testFormattedStringToDateWithSystemDefaultZoneId(TestDataTypeUtils.java:168)

I'll do some debugging to see what goes wrong.

@adenes Thanks for the feedback. After looking more closely at DateUtils.getDateFormat(format, timezoneID) it makes sense that the test in question would behave differently based on the system default timezone. I pushed an update to TestDataTypeUtils that changes the test to use DateUtils.getDateFormat(format), which implicitly sets the DateFormat time zone to GMT. This should avoid failures due to system differences and also test the implicit behavior.

[exceptionfactory]

Thanks for the feedback and testing @turcsanyip. I will run some additional tests using the flow configuration described.

[exceptionfactory]

@turcsanyip The other use of AvroTypeUtil.LOGICAL_TYPE_DATE was in the normalizeValue(), which was causing the problem with ConvertRecord. The use of new java.sql.Date() with milliseconds resulted in the system default timezone throwing off the converted date. I updated normalizeValue() to use LocalDate.ofEpochDay() and added a unit test method to confirm the corrected behavior.

[markap14]

Thanks @exceptionfactory for improving the timezone handling here! I think there are a few additional cases that need to be taken into account. Commented inline.

[markap14]

I don't believe this is sufficient. According to https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/api/java/text/SimpleDateFormat.html, the timezone can be represented using z, Z, or X, each having a different meaning. I think we have to account for all of these.

[exceptionfactory]

Thanks, I adjusted the check to use a regular expression pattern for all three characters.

[exceptionfactory]

@markap14 Thanks for the review and additional feedback, I pushed an update to address your comments. There still appear to be some edge cases for some record-oriented processors when running NiFi in different time zones, based on running some test flows from @turcsanyip. The PR as it stands addresses the test failures for certain time zones as described in NIFI-8023 through the use of the new DataTypeUtils.toLocalDate() method.

Additional work is probably necessary to address system time zone issues when using some of the JSON Record Readers and Writers, but perhaps it would be better to create a new issue to resolve those problems.

Any additional feedback @turcsanyip or @adenes?

[adenes]

@exceptionfactory , thanks for the follow-up commits. I ran the tests with CET system TZ and unfortunately some test cases fail:

[ERROR] Failures:
[ERROR]   TestAvroReaderWithEmbeddedSchema.testLogicalTypes:66->testLogicalTypes:125 expected:<2017-04-0[4]> but was:<2017-04-0[3]>
[ERROR]   TestAvroReaderWithEmbeddedSchema.testNullableLogicalTypes:72->testLogicalTypes:125 expected:<2017-04-0[4]> but was:<2017-04-0[3]>
[ERROR]   TestCSVRecordReader.testDate:119 expected:<30> but was:<29>
[ERROR]   TestCSVRecordReader.testDateNoCoersionExpectedFormat:163 expected:<30> but was:<29>
[ERROR]   TestJacksonCSVRecordReader.testDate:105 expected:<30> but was:<29>

Could you please have a look at them?

[exceptionfactory]

@exceptionfactory , thanks for the follow-up commits. I ran the tests with CET system TZ and unfortunately some test cases fail:

[ERROR] Failures:
[ERROR]   TestAvroReaderWithEmbeddedSchema.testLogicalTypes:66->testLogicalTypes:125 expected:<2017-04-0[4]> but was:<2017-04-0[3]>
[ERROR]   TestAvroReaderWithEmbeddedSchema.testNullableLogicalTypes:72->testLogicalTypes:125 expected:<2017-04-0[4]> but was:<2017-04-0[3]>
[ERROR]   TestCSVRecordReader.testDate:119 expected:<30> but was:<29>
[ERROR]   TestCSVRecordReader.testDateNoCoersionExpectedFormat:163 expected:<30> but was:<29>
[ERROR]   TestJacksonCSVRecordReader.testDate:105 expected:<30> but was:<29>

Could you please have a look at them?

Thanks @adenes I will take a look at those tests.

[exceptionfactory]

@adenes After evaluating the unit tests mentioned, I found that each one was performing date conversion in order to compare the expected results. The conversion changed the expected value, which was throwing off the tests. I updated the tests and confirmed successful test completion with the CET time zone.

[exceptionfactory]

Closing in favor of implementation in #4781