Time pseudotype instead of ISO8601 when using group operator

Question

I'm getting started with RethinkDB and I'm having some trouble understanding what's going on with some queries I'm running.

The problem is querying objects with date time types from a NodeJS app (using the rethinkdbdash driver) which exposes a JSON API. If I query my objects individually like:

db.table('apples').max('timestamp');

I get JavaScript Dates for timestamp fields, while if I run a group by operator in the query like in:

db.table('apples').group('type').max('timestamp');

I get date time pseudotypes (I think this is the correct name) for the same timestamp fields instead. Something like:

{
  "$reql_type$": "TIME",
  "epoch_time": 1423077646.772,
  "timezone": "-07:00"
}

Is this the expected behaviour? What is the logic behind it?

I would like to return serialized iso8601 dates in my JSON and not this data type to make parsing transparent to clients.

thanks,

---

UPDATE This was a known issue for versions prior to 2.2.7. Fixed here.

Maziar

Answer 1

That looks like a bug in rethinkdbdash. The server always sends times to the clients as pseudotypes (the object with the $reql_type$ field), and the clients are responsible for turning the pseudotypes into native time objects (since drivers in different languages have to do that differently). I'd open a bug at https://github.com/neumino/rethinkdbdash/issues .

I would guess the source of the bug is that group returns a GROUPED_DATA pseudotype and rethinkdbdash isn't correctly converting pseudotypes that are inside of other pseudotypes. If you run db.table('apples').group('type').max('timestamp').ungroup(), that might fix the problem for this query until the driver is patched.

Sabin

Thanks for you answer @mlucy, ungrouping does indeed fix the problem in this specific case. I'll bring it up to the rethinkdbdash people. Thanks again. – Maziar