How to import JSON with specifying which fields in the JSON of time type? - rethinkdb

Question

I'm using such command to import data to RethinkDB
rethinkdb import --force -f ${folder}/json/data.json --table test.data -c localhost:28015
It imports data perfectly. But I have some of fields in my json as time:
{
"id": "1",
"date": "2015-09-19",
"time": {
"begin": "09:00",
"end": "10:30"
}
}
When I'm trying to query these fields like data or time.begin, time.end treating them as time - RethinkDB doesn't understand it and throw exception
r.db('test').table('data').filter(function(t) {
return t("date").date()
})
RqlRuntimeError: Not a TIME pseudotype: `"2015-09-19"` in:
r.db("test").table("data").filter(function(var_43) { return var_43("date").date(); })
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Is any way to specify for RethinkDB which field in the JSON are with time type?

Answer 1

JSON doesn't provide a standard way of specifying a time field, but there are a couple ways you can do this with RethinkDB: either modify the data before or after inserting it. RethinkDB time objects are more than just the strings you have shown here, and contain millisecond time resolution along with timezone data.
Time objects can be constructed using r.now(), r.time(), r.epoch_time(), and r.ISO8601(). Because of the format of your time strings, I would use r.ISO8601(). It is important to note that your data doesn't appear to contain timezone information, so you should be sure that your data won't return incorrect results if they are all put in the same timezone.
Another thing to keep in mind when using times in RethinkDB is that the data will be converted into an appropriate time object in your client. Since it appears that you are using Javascript, you will get back a Date object. For Python, you would get a datetime.datetime object, etc. If you would rather get the raw time pseudotype format (see below), you can specify timeFormat: "raw" as a global optarg to your query (see the documentation for run() for details).
Post-process the data inside RethinkDB
This is probably the easiest option, and what I would recommend. After importing your data, you can run a query to modify each row to convert the strings into time objects. Based on the format of your data, this should work:
r.db('test').table('data').replace(function(row) {
return row.merge({
'begin_time': r.ISO8601(row('date').add('T').add(row('time')('begin')), { defaultTimezone: '+00:00' }),
'end_time': r.ISO8601(row('date').add('T').add(row('time')('end')), { defaultTimezone: '+00:00' })
}).without('date', 'time');
}).run(conn, callback)
This replaces the date and time fields from all the rows in your test.data table with begin_time and end_time time objects that can be used as you expect. The defaultTimezone field is required because the time string doesn't contain timezone information, but you should change these values to whatever is appropriate.
Modify the JSON data
This is a bit lower-level and can be tricky, but if you don't mind getting your hands dirty, this could be more suited to your needs.
RethinkDB time objects are communicated in JSON using a particular format to represent a 'pseudotype'. These are types not standardized in JSON that still exist in RethinkDB. The format for a time pseudotype looks like this:
{
"$reql_type$": "TIME",
"epoch_time": 1413843783.195,
"timezone": "+00:00"
}
Where epoch_time is the number of seconds since the UNIX epoch (Jan 1, 1970). If the data you are importing follows this format, you can insert this directly and it will be interpreted by the database as a valid time object. It would be up to you to modify the data you are importing, but your example row would look something like this:
{
"id": "1",
"begin_time": {
"$reql_type$": "TIME",
"epoch_time": 1442653200,
"timezone": "+00:00"
},
"end_time': {
"$reql_type$": "TIME",
"epoch_time": 1442658600,
"timezone": "+00:00"
}
}
My same caveat for timezones applies here as well.