543375 - Undated RSS and Atom feeds result in display of bad date

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(SeaMonkey :: Feed Discovery and Preview, defect)

Description

[Andy Boze]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.8pre) Gecko/20100129 SeaMonkey/2.0.3pre compatible Firefox/3.5.4
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.8pre) Gecko/20100129 SeaMonkey/2.0.3pre

If you display an RSS or Atom feed that had no date, SeaMonkey displays the wrong date instead of no date.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Go to http://akapuma.info/
2. Click on the feed indicator in the location bar and select Atom.
3.
Actual Results:  
The feed is dated "Wednesday, December 31, 1969 7:00 PM".

Expected Results:  
No date should be displayed.

See http://www.nd.edu/~fboze/index.shtml for an example of a similar RSS malfunction.

Comment 1

[Philip Chee]

Firefox (Minefield) does this:

  _parseDate: function FW__parseDate(dateString) {
    // Convert the date into the user's local time zone
    dateObj = new Date(dateString);

    // Make sure the date we're given is valid.
    if (!dateObj.getTime())
      return false;

SeaMonkey 2.1a1pre does this:

  _parseDate: function FW__parseDate(dateString) {
    // Convert the date into the user's local time zone
    dateObj = new Date(dateString);

    // Make sure the date we're given is valid.
    if (!dateObj.getTime())
      return false;

var dateObj = new Date(null);
dateObj.getTime(); <= result 0

isNaN(dateObj.getTime()); <= result false

!dateObj.getTime(); <= result true

So |new Date(null)| basically gives the current date.

Comment 2

[Philip Chee]

From Bug 415372 Comment 24    [e-mail]      2009-01-25 13:53:48 PST

>>+    if (!dateObj.getTime())
> if (isNAN(dateObj.getTime()))
Woo!

Comment 3

[Philip Chee]

Attachment: Patch v1.0 one line fix.

-    if (isNaN(dateObj.getTime()))
+    if (!dateObj.getTime())

Correctness fix.

Comment 4

[[e-mail]]

Comment on attachment 424572 [details] [diff] [review]
Patch v1.0 one line fix.

The problem here is that we're expecting new Date(null) to fail, but it doesn't, since the null gets converted to zero, which is a valid date.

So, you could either return early for an empty or null date string, or you could use Date.parse to convert it into a number first, and if you don't get NaN then you can then make a date from that number.

Comment 5

[Philip Chee]

Attachment: Patch v1.1

> So, you could either return early for an empty or null date string, or you
> could use Date.parse to convert it into a number first, and if you don't get
> NaN then you can then make a date from that number.
I've used the latter recommendation.

Comment 6

[[e-mail]]

Comment on attachment 425428 [details] [diff] [review]
Patch v1.1

>+    // Make sure the date we're given is valid.
>+    if (isNaN(Date.parse(dateString)))
So, we get to parse the date twice... passing the return value of Date.parse into new Date would avoid that, but probably look uglier instead.

>+      return null;
>+    // Convert the date into the user's local time zone.
>     var dateObj = new Date(dateString);
> 
Nit: odd spacing, could do with the blank line above moved to after the return.

Comment 7

[Philip Chee]

Attachment: Patch v1.2 Fix nits [Checkin: Comment 9 & 10]

Carrying forward r=neil sr=neil

> So, we get to parse the date twice... passing the return value of Date.parse
> into new Date would avoid that, but probably look uglier instead.
I agree.

>>+      return null;
>>+    // Convert the date into the user's local time zone.
>>     var dateObj = new Date(dateString);
>>
> Nit: odd spacing, could do with the blank line above moved to after the return.
Fixed.

Comment 8

[Philip Chee]

Comment on attachment 425629 [details] [diff] [review]
Patch v1.2 Fix nits
[Checkin: Comment 9 & 10]

Correctness fix to bogus dates in Feed Preview.
Risk factors: none I can think of.

Comment 9

[Serge Gautherie (:sgautherie)]

Comment on attachment 425629 [details] [diff] [review]
Patch v1.2 Fix nits
[Checkin: Comment 9 & 10]


http://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/rev/7073dcec0ba3

Comment 10

[Serge Gautherie (:sgautherie)]

Comment on attachment 425629 [details] [diff] [review]
Patch v1.2 Fix nits
[Checkin: Comment 9 & 10]


http://hg.mozilla.org/releases/comm-1.9.1/rev/70d0c9ec8baa

Comment 11

[Thomas]

Hello,

seamonkey 2.0.4 is published, and the bug is fixed.

After seamonkey works fine, I updated my homepage with the new "easy feed editor" version 3.0. In this version, the atom feed is with date. Therefore, my homepage http://akapuma.info is not longer appropriate for testing.

Best regards

akapuma