Support activities with dates in the Unix timestamp format

Fixes #763 (closed)

Site https://juick.com sent activities with a published field in the "Unix timestamp with milliseconds" format (1553808404.602961) instead of ISO 8601. It caused an error in activity_view.ex.

They claimed that they had changed the date format in the Jackson library (JSON library for Java Spring framework) settings, but I still got this error for some their activities.

Can you also add code for the case that the format is nothing of these? For example, missing, or a garbage string? It should just log a warning and drop the activity then.

That's their fault, published should be xsd:dateTime, not a unix timestamp per AS2 https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-vocabulary/#dfn-published . I don't think we should support this off-spec implementation

Also it looks like they can actually return something that looks like a proper date format (the whole response is garbage tho):

$ curl -sSL -H 'Accept: application/ld+json,application/activity+json,application/json' 'https://juick.com/ma1uta/2938970' | jq .
{
  "timestamp": "2019-04-01T21:24:29.474+0000",
  "status": 406,
  "error": "Not Acceptable",
  "message": "Not Acceptable",
  "path": "/ma1uta/2938970"
}

@lanodan yes, I mentioned that in the MR description. But I continued to receive activities in the wrong format after that.

They probably just don't have activity database migrations. And even if it is the new activities, I consider this to be an issue on their side, not ours

Still, we shouldn't die on receiving these and instead should drop their activities.

I agree with that, we should add a check to Transmogrifier for the correct date format I guess?

added 1 commit

• 3db92351 - Ignore dates in wrong formats

Compare with previous version

I don't get why we should skip activities with wrong dates entirely. As @lambadalambda said, it's a warning.

Furthermore, we already handle dates in the wrong formats and return "" for them. I expanded that logic to all possible inputs in 3db92351 and added logger warn message. Here is how it looks like in my logs:

This seems alright actually. What do you think, @rinpatch ?

yeah, I think it this is reasonable

merged

mentioned in commit 256b492a