Parsing of Date/Time/Datetime in bindings

[CyberDaedalus00]

It appears the generated parsing code is incorrect with regards to the parsing of xs:date, xs:time, and xs:datetime in the bindings API of python-maec 4.1.0.9. The attributes are actually python strings instead of python datetime.

As an example of the source of this, the parsing of the 'start_datetime' attribute on the AnalysisType complexType is handled as follows:

    value = find_attr_value_('start_datetime', node)
    if value is not None and 'start_datetime' not in already_processed:
        already_processed.add('start_datetime')
        try:
            self.start_datetime = value
        except ValueError, exp:
            raise ValueError('Bad date-time attribute (start_datetime): %s' % exp)

but should be handled as follows, as is done in the handling of equivalent types in the python-stix Bindings API:

    value = find_attr_value_('timestamp', node)
    if value is not None and 'timestamp' not in already_processed:
        already_processed.add('timestamp')
        try:
            self.timestamp = self.gds_parse_datetime(value, node, 'timestamp')
        except ValueError, exp:
            raise ValueError('Bad date-time attribute (timestamp): %s' % exp)

The issue is the 'value' returned from find-attr_value is a python string and needs to be converted to a datetime object by calling self.gds_parse_datetime(). Given that self.gds_validate_datetime() wasn't called nor was self.gds_parse_datetime() was call and yet there is exception handling, it appears as if the parsing code was modified.

[ikiril01]

@CyberDaedalus00 thanks for reporting this! You're right in that we modified the parsing code to remove the gds_parse_datetime usage; its been a while, but I believe it was because it caused issues when dumping parsed MAEC XML documents as JSON:

0d844b6

I'm going to do some further testing to see if this is still an issue.

[ikiril01]

This is related to the CybOX issue I linked to above. Once we have consensus on the solution, we may able to revert the bindings to function as before.

[gtback]

@ikiril01: I believe that the commit you reference has the effect of treating dates parsed from XML as strings rather than date-times. I don't think that's we want to work with them in the Python APIs; better to use the Python datetime class.