Bad time format on 'startTime', when using REST API Refreshes

[jaapinho]

Hello,

I'm using POWERBI REST API to automate refreshes, with a Python script of mine.

When I check for the last refresh, I use startTime, to know when the last refresh was started.

Most often I get a value as such : yyyy-mm-ddThh:mm:ss.xxxxZ  (xxxx are the microseconds). No problem there...

But, every now and then, I get a value as such : yyyy-mm-ddThh:mm:ssZ  (Without the microseconds), which is a different date format.

I'm not 100% sure, but it would seem that, when a refresh starts exactly at 0000 microseconds of a second, the microseconds are not included in the data format. I was expecting, in that case, to get a value as such : yyyy-mm-ddThh:mm:ss.0000Z

I had to include a try/except on the script, to manage this situation... but I don't believe it was intended that way.

Should I report this as a Bug ?

[lbendlin · Accepted solution]

Those are milliseconds, not microseconds.

Why would you consider that to be a bug?  Both strings are valid ISO8601 datetime strings.

[jaapinho]

Hi,

Thx for the milliseconds correction.

I wasn't sure it was a bug, hence my question if I should report it as such or not...

For me, it didn't seem normal to receive these different string formats, but I get now from your answer that this is expected... The way I was handling it (Through datetime.strptime) is basically a hack, so I'll be delving into the dateutil library to find a better way. SOLVED.