On Tue, Jan 13, 2015 at 6:00 AM, gisjon <jon@anonymised.com> wrote:
I've recently made a change to the GeoServer Shapefile output format code
to
use the RetypingFeatureCollection to cast all Timestamps to Strings for a
project I'm working on. This is to avoid the issue with the all datetime
fields only persisting the date portion of the value in the DBF associated
with the shapefile zip package - something anyone who has worked with
shapefiles I'm sure finds highly frustrating. I got really tired of
doubling up layers with SQL views to cast all datetime fields to string for
the purpose of shapefile exports...
Is this something any one else would find useful? I had originally coded
the functionality it to be enabled through the use of a format_options key,
but decided there was never a case I wouldn't want to do this as precision
is lost.
I think it would be useful to some, but would also break others.
If you look in the shepefile data store
there is a system variable you can set to make it dump timestamps
using the "@" type (timestamp in dbase7 format,
http://www.dbase.com/KnowledgeBase/int/db7_file_fmt.htm)
We don't do that by default because few shapefile readers can deal with
that format, the shapefile spefication being based on dbase 3.
So I guess having an option to dump timestamps as strings makes sense,
but I believe it should stay an option, as with the extra precision you also
lose the information that the field is temporal.
So... I'd resume the format option, and submit a pull request 
Cheers
Andrea
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