How to modify attribute types for the content delivery web service?

Question

I am very new to Tridion and am starting to play around with consuming the content delivery web service in Java.

The problem I am seeing is the similar to this post, https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9207354/odata4j-exceptions-odd-number-of-characters-and-bad-valuestring-part-of-key. The tl;dr is that for some reason the content delivery web service is labeling an attribute type as Edm.DateTime but is sending it as an Edm.DateTimeOffset like so:

<d:CreationDate m:type="Edm.DateTime">2014-04-28T20:53:36-04:00</d:CreationDate>

Is there a way to configure this? I have looked through all of the cd_*_.xml files but am unable to find anything that looks like what I would expect to see. The poster in the link above mentions a solution:

The fix is very simple if you have access to the OData Producer code:

and shows how to modify the code but I am not sure if I have access to the web service producer code via Tridion. Thanks in advance for your help!

Edit: Sorry, I should have mentioned that we are using Tridion 2013 SP1.

Answer 1

There is known bug with OData Tridion 2011 SP1 OData Web Service. Please follow this link from one of Tridion Expert (Mihai) : http://yatb.mitza.net/2013/07/a-java-service-oriented-architecture.html (Look for the below section) You don't need to modify the producer code, you can simply modify the odata4j client code.

Trouble with Edm.DateTime

There seems to be a bug in Tridion 2011SP1 CD WS -- the format of Edm.DateTime values (the Tridion dates) are in invalid format according to the OData specification. The values coming from OData contain timezone information, while they should not. The OData Edm.DateTime format does not allow timezone information. There is however an OData type Edm.DateTimeOffset, which allows the date formats with timezone information.

When using the OOTB OData4j libraries, you would get an Illegal datetime format exception. I fixed this issue by patching OData4j library (thank you for being open source! ;-) ).

In class org.odata4j.internal.InternalUtil, change the method parseDateTimeFromXml, and comment the throw statement at the end. Instead, delegate the parsing to parseDateTimeOffsetFromXml.

... return parseDateTimeOffsetFromXml(value).toLocalDateTime(); // throw new IllegalArgumentException("Illegal datetime format " + value); }

The new patched odata4j-0.7.0-clientbundle-patched.jar is available in my Google Code project.