[swift-evolution] [Pitch] DateComponents{Encoding/Decoding}Strategy in JSON{Encoder/Decoder}
Itai Ferber
iferber at apple.com
Fri Sep 8 16:11:06 CDT 2017
Hi Pitiphong,
Thanks for taking the time and energy to pitch this, too! If we can find
a good solution for matching this up with ISO 8601, and we have high
demand for this feature, I think it will be worth reconsidering again in
the future.
Thanks for the input!
— Itai
On 8 Sep 2017, at 13:00, Pitiphong Phongpattranont wrote:
> Hi Itai,
>
> As I told you in my last email that I’m thinking about the ISO 8601
> case. After thinking about that, having a discussion in the Swift
> Evolution and reading your emails, I think it may not worth to add
> this into Swift Standard Library. I think the use case is not that
> much so it’s not worth the cost of maintenance alone not to mention
> or think about how to implement it properly (if we choose to do and
> support the `iso8601` strategy.
>
> I think I will close this pitch and would like to thank you for
> reviewing and discussing on this.
>
>
> — Pitiphong P.
>
>> On 7 Sep BE 2560, at 01:03, Itai Ferber <iferber at apple.com> wrote:
>>
>> Hi Pitiphong,
>>
>> Don’t worry — your original email was clear, and we are on the
>> same page about Date{En,De}codingStrategy and
>> DateComponents{En,De}codingStrategy being separate things.
>> To clarify my points, though, there are two main things I want to
>> say:
>>
>> I think there is a mismatch here between your goal of representing
>> the components of a date (and what DateComponents can specifically
>> hold) and the goal of ISO 8601
>> I think that there is an inherent problem in parsing DateComponents
>> due to ambiguity
>> I think both of these issues can be solved by reading and writing a
>> Date (formatted however you need it to be) instead of DateComponents.
>>
>> To elaborate:
>>
>> DateComponents is meant to be a container for an arbitrary subset of
>> information about a Date. A Date represents a specific instant in
>> time, but DateComponents are effectively meaningless without
>> additional context. In the examples that you give, it’s possible to
>> represent the concepts at hand with DateComponents, but in order to
>> make those components actionable and meaningful, you still need to
>> convert them to Dates. Note also that:
>>
>> It’s entirely possible to create a DateComponents which represents
>> a date which does not exist, or a time which does not exist
>> Any of these concepts can also be represented by a Date instead of
>> just components; e.g., an all-day event can be represented by a Date
>> that represents the beginning of the day (00:00:00) and a flag that
>> indicates that the time of the event can be ignored, or by a start
>> Date that represents the start of the day and and end Date that
>> represents the end of the day
>> Unlike DateComponents, ISO 8601 strings have some structure to them.
>> They cannot represent just a time zone, for instance, or some
>> singular components of a date/time (e.g. a month without a year, a
>> day without a month and year, a minute without an hour, a second
>> without a minute and hour, etc.). I think this is a relatively large
>> conceptual mismatch that is worth considering deeply. There are a lot
>> of DateComponents instances which simply cannot be represented by an
>> ISO 8601 string
>>
>> There is also the issue of decoding arbitrary ISO 8601 strings into
>> DateComponents. DateComponents, having no structure at all, have no
>> specified format they can expect to decode from, and ISO 8601 does
>> not always provide that structure. Consider the following example:
>>
>> ISO 8601 allows for date representations by year, month, and day
>> (YYYY-MM-DD), among other forms. But it also allows days to be left
>> unspecified (YYYY-MM), and even months (YYYY)
>> Similarly, it allows for a time representations by hour, minute, and
>> second (hh:mm:ss), but also just hour and minute (hh:mm), and just
>> hour (hh). Importantly, it allows time separators to be omitted
>> (hhmmss, hhmm, hh)
>> Consider then, attempting to parse the string "2017" without any
>> context — what DateComponents should be read out? Intuitively, 2017
>> looks like a year (YYYY), but it is equally valid to parse as the
>> time 20:17 (hhmm). Without knowing the expected format, parsing is
>> ambiguous
>> We cannot promise to parse DateComponents in all cases because there
>> are many combinations of strings that are just completely ambiguous.
>>
>> So, to get at the core of this — if there is a specific format that
>> you would like to encode to and from, why not do so with a Date and a
>> DateFormatter (or if you need ISO 8601 specifically,
>> ISO8601DateFormatter)? With a formatter, the format is unambiguous
>> because you explicitly provide it, and there is nothing the date
>> can’t represent that DateComponents can. You can always parse the
>> date and pull out only those components that you care about. You also
>> mention interoperability with an external JSON source — how is that
>> source producing a string/parsing one back? [What I’m getting at
>> here is: what is the value of adding a new, potentially risky
>> strategy over existing methods that might work just as well, or
>> better?]
>>
>> And lastly, if .iso8601 is not necessarily a good fit for this
>> strategy, what separates .custom from just overriding encode(to:) and
>> init(from:) and writing the components out in the format that you
>> need?
>>
>> I think answers to these questions can help us push this forward. :)
>>
>> — Itai
>>
>> On 5 Sep 2017, at 10:41, Pitiphong Phongpattranont wrote:
>>
>> Hi Itai,
>>
>> I think my first pitch email was not clear enough and want to sorry
>> for that. I have been working on a calendar app for awhile and
>> understand the concept of calendar or date and time programming in
>> some level. I didn’t pitch the idea of encoding and decoding `Date`
>> value with this `DateComponents{Encoding/Decoding}Strategy`. I still
>> agree that `Date` value should be encoded/decoded with the
>> `Date{Encoding/Decoding}Strategy`. The
>> DateComponents{Encoding/Decoding}Strategy I pitched only apply for
>> `DateComponents` value only.
>>
>> About the use case, I think there are some application which store an
>> information of a `Date` value that is not include a time value (A
>> date of September 6th, 2017) for example a calendar app which want to
>> store the Start and End date of an `All Day Event` with a value of
>> DateComponents type or an alarm app which want to store just a time
>> of the day that user want to set an recurring alarm (10:30am.)
>>
>> The problem I found with the current implementation is that I have no
>> control on how the DateComponents implement the conformance methods
>> of the Encodable and Decodable protocol. This means that if I have a
>> service that serialize those properties with a difference notation
>> (ISO 8601 in my case) then I cannot rely on the auto synthesized
>> implementation from the compiler and need to do a manual
>> encoding/decoding by manually implement the Encodable and Decodable
>>
>> Lastly, on the issue that `ISO8601` standard does not support every
>> components in DateComponents, I still haven’t thought this though
>> and still thinking about it. I want to pitch the idea first and would
>> like to have a discussion/brainstorm on should we do this and how we
>> can do it. My backup plan is doesn’t include the `iso8601` strategy
>> but still have the `custom` strategy for those who need to apply a
>> custom encoding/decoding strategy which will be apply to all values
>> in a payload. Since we encode/decode a JSON from one source at a time
>> and the encoding/decoding strategy of DateComponents of that source
>> should be consistency throughout its types (which may be the types
>> that I own or the types from a 3rd party service), I think this still
>> is a valid use case for providing a custom strategy.
>>
>> Thank you
>> — Pitiphong P.
>>
>>
>>> On 6 Sep BE 2560, at 00:15, Itai Ferber <iferber at apple.com
>>> <mailto:iferber at apple.com>> wrote:
>>>
>>> Hi Pitiphong,
>>>
>>> Thanks for pitching this! My main question here is about the use
>>> case. Since encoding/decoding strategies apply to all values in a
>>> payload (whether or not those belong to types that you own), they
>>> inherently come with some risk.
>>> What is the use case in mind for needing to encode and decode
>>> DateComponents directly, as opposed to encoding and decoding a Date
>>> instance and pulling the components you need from that?
>>>
>>> From a correctness standpoint, I also want to point out that
>>> DateComponents is really just a "bag of stuff" that doesn’t
>>> necessarily mean much until converted into a Date through a Calendar
>>> and a TimeZone. There is somewhat of a mismatch between this "bag of
>>> stuff" and what ISO 8601 intends to represent — an actual date and
>>> time. It’s possible to represent things in a DateComponents that
>>> don’t really make sense for (or are not supported by)
>>> ISO-8601-formatted dates. For instance, you can have a
>>> DateComponents which just has a TimeZone, but ISO 8601 does not
>>> allow representing a time zone without a corresponding time.
>>> DateComponents also, for instance, has a quarter component (among
>>> others) which I’m almost certain ISO 8601 has no equivalent for.
>>>
>>> Given that conceptual mismatch, I think we’d need a very
>>> compelling use case to support this over simply using Date.
>>>
>>> — Itai
>>>
>>> On 3 Sep 2017, at 0:55, Pitiphong Phongpattranont via
>>> swift-evolution wrote:
>>>
>>> Hi folks, I have an idea on improving the JSON{Encoder/Decoder} to
>>> pitch.
>>>
>>> Since JSON doesn’t have a native representation for
>>> `DateComponents` like it doesn’t have for `Date` too so that
>>> there’re many ways to represent it in JSON, for example ISO 8601,
>>> UNIX timestamp, etc. for Date. There are also a few ways to
>>> represent `DateComponents` too, for example ISO 8601
>>> (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601
>>> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601>) also describes how to
>>> represent some of the valid date components (e.g. "2017-09-03”).
>>> Unlike what JSON{Encoder/Decoder} does to represent `Date` value
>>> with several strategy but there is no support like that for
>>> `DateComponents`.
>>>
>>> The current implementation DateComponents is to encode/decode with
>>> KeyedContainer and cannot provide a custom or ISO 8601 compatible
>>> implementation. So I think JSON{Encoder/Decoder} should have a
>>> strategy for encoding/decoding `DateComponents` just like for Date
>>>
>>> Here’s an initial `DateComponentsStrategy` strategy that I want
>>> JSON{Encoder/Decoder} I can think of now, any suggestion is
>>> welcomed.
>>>
>>> ```swift
>>> /// The strategy to use for encoding `DateComponents` values.
>>> public enum DateComponentsStrategy {
>>> /// Defer to `Date` for choosing an encoding. This is the default
>>> strategy.
>>> case deferredToDateComponents
>>>
>>> /// Encode the `Date` as an ISO-8601-formatted string (in RFC 3339
>>> format).
>>> case iso8601
>>>
>>> /// Encode the `Date` as a custom value encoded by the given
>>> closure.
>>> ///
>>> /// If the closure fails to encode a value into the given encoder,
>>> the encoder will encode an empty automatic container in its place.
>>> case custom((DateComponents, Encoder) throws -> Void)
>>> }
>>> ```
>>>
>>> What do you guys think about this pitch?
>>>
>>>
>>> Pitiphong Phongpattranont
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> swift-evolution mailing list
>>> swift-evolution at swift.org <mailto:swift-evolution at swift.org>
>>> https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-evolution
>>> <https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-evolution>
>>
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