timezone of completed tasks not taken into account

[chrisgurney]

To Reproduce
I was looking for all tasks completed on 2024-02-25:

kwargs['status'] = None
kwargs['stop_date'] = f'{DATE}'
tasks = things.tasks(**kwargs)

...but it returns some tasks on the day before, particularly those that were completed close to midnight:

Here's the stopDate for one of the returned tasks: 1708826542.13277

GMT: Sunday, February 25, 2024 2:02:22.132 AM
Your time zone: Saturday, February 24, 2024 9:02:22.132 PM GMT-05:00

Expected behavior
When I supply a stop_date I expect it to be reflective of my local timezone: i.e., get all tasks completed on that day for me.

[chrisgurney]

@mikez per our discussion, adding your proposed solution here:

Currently:

• in responses, stop_date, modified, and created are in "localtime";
• in queries, stop_date expects GMT (aka UTC) dates.

The database itself stores these dates as UTC.

Suggested Changes

Make both responses and queries be in localtime. What do you think?

To do so, tweak these functions in database.py of things.py:

• make_unixtime_filter
• optionally, make_unixtime_range_filter (for "created")

Want to give it a shot? Hopefully, these should be easy edits and not involve much more than adding "localtime" to the SQL-query, i.e., date(stopDate, 'unixepoch', 'localtime') instead of date(stopDate, 'unixepoch').

[mikez]

LGTM; if easy, maybe want to add some tests? https://github.com/thingsapi/things.py/blob/main/tests/test_things.py

/cc @AlexanderWillner in case you want to guide on tests or have thoughts on this.

[chrisgurney]

@mikez @AlexanderWillner A few questions on this:

1. How do I go about adding data to test against? I feel like directly updating the database is not the way to go. Is there a way to start up the Things app, pointed at this database? Or do I need to replace my own with this?

2. How does this work with localtime? Won't the test(s) produce different results depending on who runs them? (Can we somehow hardcode the timezone the local user is in?)

3. Is the test approach here something like this?

• Add tasks to database around midnight UTC (within a hardcoded timezone offset).
• things.tasks(stop_date=DATE) should only include tasks on DATE, in the user's local timezone
• things.tasks(stop_date=DATE) should not return tasks for a DATE when it the date matches the UTC date, but is not in the user's local timezone.

[mikez]

@chrisgurney You can set the TZ environment variable for testing.

import os
os.environ['TZ'] = 'CET'  # or EST, JST, etc.

Updating the database is the way @AlexanderWillner has done tests in the past.

[AlexanderWillner]

How do I go about adding data to test against? I feel like directly updating the database is not the way to go. Is there a way to start up the Things app, pointed at this database? Or do I need to replace my own with this?

I used the Makefile to copy the database file: https://github.com/thingsapi/things.py/blob/main/Makefile#L139
You should first backup the original database of course ;)

[mikez]

@chrisgurney Checking in where you're at with this and if you still have unanswered questions?

[mikez]

@chrisgurney Checking in again. Happy to help out here, let me know... :)