Strange timezone adjustment issue

[Blackbaud-StewartStephens]

I'm running into a strange issue in my pact tests which I believe I have isolated to the pact-mock_service. My service is .NET (C#) and in one of my interactions I setup an interaction with a DateTimeOffset string in the body the timezone of that string is changed (and the time correctly adjusted) when the pact file is written. Because developer machines may run on a different timezone than build machines, this causes issues.

To reproduce this, and eliminate the I called the admin REST endpoints directly. I set the timezone on my machine to Pacific Time (UTC-08:00). After starting the mock service, I made two calls:

First: POST /interactions

{
    provider_state: 'test',
    description: 'test',
    request: {
        method: 'get',
        path: '/test'
    },
    response: {
        status: 200,
        headers: {
            'Content-Type': 'application/json; charset=utf-8'
        },
        body: {
            datetimeoffset: '2012-12-12T01:11:11-05:00'
        }
    }
}

This returned: 200 Added interaction

Then: POST /pact

{
    provider: {
        name: 'test-participant'
    },
    consumer: {
        name: 'test-consumer'
    }
}

This returned: 200

{
  "provider": {
    "name": "test-participant"
  },
  "consumer": {
    "name": "test-consumer"
  },
  "interactions": [
    {
      "description": "test",
      "provider_state": "test",
      "request": {
        "method": "get",
        "path": "/test"
      },
      "response": {
        "status": 200,
        "headers": {
          "Content-Type": "application/json; charset=utf-8"
        },
        "body": {
          "datetimeoffset": "2012-12-11T22:11:11-08:00"
        }
      }
    }
  ],
  "metadata": {
    "pactSpecificationVersion": "1.1.0"
  }
}

Note that the timezone has been adjusted, although it still refers to the same point in time.

With the mock server still running, I can set my timezone to Eastern Time (UCT-05:00) and call POST /pact again and get the same result (timezone adjusted). This suggests that something is happening to the date when the interaction is added.

I'm not familiar with Ruby so I wasn't able to debug into the server itself. Does this sound like an issue with the mock service, or am I just doing something wrong?

[bethesque]

That's weirding me out, because the mock service doesn't do any parsing of times. It just thinks that's a string. Can you find and post the mock service logs for me?

[Blackbaud-StewartStephens]

Sure. Here are the complete contents of the log, after replicating above:

2017-09-01 06:39:43.832 -07:00 [Info] Started http://localhost:60015
2017-09-01 06:39:53.693 -07:00 [Info] Registered expected interaction GET /test
2017-09-01 06:39:53.720 -07:00 [Debug] {
  "description": "test",
  "provider_state": "test",
  "request": {
    "method": "get",
    "path": "/test"
  },
  "response": {
    "status": 200,
    "headers": {
      "Content-Type": "application/json; charset=utf-8"
    },
    "body": {
      "datetimeoffset": "2012-12-11T22:11:11-08:00"
    }
  }
}

After spending a bit more time with this, I'm beginning to think that the issue is actually in pact-net. It turns out that the pact-net nancy server is sitting in between my requests and the pact-mock_server. I think the timezone conversion may occur when the add interaction request is deserialized by pact-net. That would explain why the interactions are registered with the wrong values.

[Blackbaud-StewartStephens]

I've confirmed that the issue is related to JSON deserialization in Pact.Net.