Primavera P6: date/time parsing (PrimaveraXERFileReader)

[alex-matatov]

Hi Jon,

Even #579 was false alarm there is still date/time parse issue in mpxj lib.

This time I am sure that our test XER file was not produced by our software and is an original P6 one.

Seems, Primavera P6 v16 and higher uses date/time format like this -> 2021-09-13 08:00 and mpxj parses it successfully.
However, Primavera P6 v15 uses a little bit different format -> 2021-9-13 08:00 (1 digit for January..September months) . This time mpxj fails to parse it.

The fix is quite trivial.. In PrimaveraXERFileReader date/time formatter could be changed like below (use only 1 M). SO, both 2021-09-13 08:00 and 2021-9-13 08:00 will be parsed correctly.

private final DateTimeFormatter m_df = DateTimeFormatter.ofPattern("yyyy-M-dd[ HH:mm[:ss]]");

Also, if DateTimeFormater from net.sf.mpxj.primavera.DatatypeConverter will be changed to ISO one (see my last comment here that PrimaveraPMFileReader will support more date/time formats:

2023-09-28T17:00:00.56
2023-09-28T17:00:00
2023-09-28T17:00

Note:

Currently, if mpxj can't parse date/time string (xer and xml) it silently (even without warning) ignores it and sets NULL to the corresponding field. So there could be a situation that technically P6 project is loaded but all or some of Tasks have planningStartDate == NULL. This situation could lead to incorrect data processing later.

I would suggest to throw "Unexpected date/time format" exception in this case (or do it when reader.setIgnoreErrors(false)) .

[Jon Iles]

I've updated the format to handle single digit months. I'll have a look at the date/time parse error handling.

[Jon Iles]

I've made some changes to error handling in #585. Readers which are by default silently ignoring some data type conversion errors can now be configured using the setIgnoreErrors(). If the default behavior of ignoring errors is used, the new method ProjectFile.getIgnoredErrors() can be used to retrieve details of any ignored errors.