Mongo: Unrecognized parameter to $dateToString: timezone

Charlie L 21

Using the $dateToString Mongo aggregation operator with the optional timezone parameter results in the following error, using Cosmos Mongo with Wire Protocol 3.6:

{"ok": 0.0, "errmsg": "Unrecognized parameter to $dateToString: timezone", "code": 18534, "codeName": "18534"}

Support for this parameter was introduced in Mongo 3.6. The $dateToString operator is documented as supported by Cosmos's Mongo 3.6 API without any caveats.

Is the lack of support for timezone an oversight? This parameter allows our application to tailor analytics reports to the user's timezone.

Navtej Singh Saini 4,226 Reputation points Microsoft Employee

2020-07-27T22:30:44.537+00:00

@CharlieL-3009

Thanks for the question. Can you please share the complete query block for which you are getting this error.

Regards
Navtej S
Navtej Singh Saini 4,226 Reputation points Microsoft Employee

2020-07-29T15:53:53.383+00:00

@Charlie L

Please help with the Query so we can look into this further and provide the help as required.

Thanks
Navtej S
Charlie L 21 Reputation points

2020-07-30T00:29:18.017+00:00
@Navtej Singh Saini

Hi Navtej,

The aggregation pipeline is as follows, although I've simplified the $match criteria since that's not relevant.

[ { "$match": { "serverId": { "$oid": "5f221290c2b05c70df4100f5" } } }, { "$group": { "_id": { "$dateToString": { "date": "$issueDate", "format": "%Y-%m-%d", "timezone": "-07:00" } }, "count": { "$sum": 1 } } } ]

Other values accepted by Mongo 3.6 for the timezone parameter include Olson Timezone Identifiers such as "America/New_York", UTC offsets such as "-07:00" and the strings "Z", "UTC" and "GMT".
Navtej Singh Saini 4,226 Reputation points Microsoft Employee

2020-08-05T16:36:26.45+00:00

Please let us know if you need any further information regarding this.

Thanks
Navtej S

Accepted answer

Navtej Singh Saini 4,226 Reputation points Microsoft Employee

2020-08-04T23:11:29.467+00:00

@Charlie L

We contacted our team and the confirmed that the timezone parameter is not supported for dateToString at this time. The document doesn’t go into detail for individual parameters. The Tentative plan to support timezone around the end of the year.

A workaround is to convert the time zone client-side. Also we will try to add more details to document itself to avoid confusion.

You can also raise a feedback on Azure Feedback where PG can check it and prioritize new features accordingly.

Let us know if you need any further help regarding this.

Thanks
Navtej S
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Charlie L 21 Reputation points

2020-08-05T17:20:02.06+00:00

@Navtej Singh Saini
Thank you for confirming that the timezone parameter is unsupported.

It's not possible to workaround this issue on the client side when grouping by a date without a time, as my example query does.

It might be possible to workaround the issue using the $subtract aggregation operator. Was this workaround already considered and rejected by your team?
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Mongo: Unrecognized parameter to $dateToString: timezone

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