[couchbase] iOS date problems

[PeterStaev]

I'm experiencing some strange problems with dates being saved/loaded in the DB as null values. It is very random. So far it is happening for different locales, different time zones. Sometimes in a single object that has 2 fields with dates - one might get it right and the other one get as null. I'm not able to determine any pattern.

Looking at the code seems you are using NSDateFormatter to serialize dates using their JS .toISOString(). Reading through some best practices, seems when you want a fixed format it is best you also set the local to en_US_POSIX to avoid problems:
https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/DataFormatting/Articles/dfDateFormatting10_4.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40002369-SW7

Also for iOS10+ it is recommended to use the newly introduced NSISO8601DateFormatter
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/foundation/nsdateformatter#2528261
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/foundation/nsiso8601dateformatter

What do you think to tweak the logic and use either ot those?

Also is there any reason why you have made the format use the Z timezone pattern, instead of the char Z. So you have

dateFormatter.dateFormat = "yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss.SSSZ"

instead of

dateFormatter.dateFormat = "yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss.SSS'Z'"

Here is an example of how the string format looks like with either of those: https://swiftfiddle.com/?c=H4sIAAAAAAAAA6tWSlayUsrMLcgvKlFwyy%2FNS0ksyczPiwHCnNQShQoFWwWXxJJUt%2Fyi3MSSktQiDU2QVIVeClwQqCJGqRIIdH19dVNS1EPUPTyscnOtiov1goODo2KUYvIKijLzSjQq9IpLgIx0jbSi%2FFwrsLF6efnlmiSaqB6lToSZSjpKZUCPmekZ6Bkp1QIAEfFcXeYAAAA%3D

[PeterStaev]

Since reporting the problem, I've manually patched the from ISO date function for iOS and no users have reported the previous problems. So seems the current implementation in some specific cases causes problems. Below is to what I've changed the function. I would have submitted a PR to adjust this, but seems the plugin code is different from the source in this repo although I'm using the latest available 1.4.0 version from 2 years back.

    static fromISO8601UTC(date) {
        const dateFormatter = NSDateFormatter.new();
        dateFormatter.dateFormat = "yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss.SSS'Z'";
        dateFormatter.locale = NSLocale.localeWithLocaleIdentifier("en_US_POSIX");
        dateFormatter.timeZone = NSTimeZone.timeZoneForSecondsFromGMT(0);
        return dateFormatter.dateFromString(date);
    }

[triniwiz]

Hey @PeterStaev sorry this got lost, I've made a couple changes here and there but I can include the suggest code if you like

[PeterStaev]

Hey @triniwiz , it would be great to include the changed function above as seems it resolves the problem (and doesn't cause any new ones :) ).