Birth date interpretation issue in Ruby model

[CyberFerret]

Discovered a fairly high priority, reproducible error in the date interpretation in the Xero Ruby Gem.

If I enter an employee birthdate of 31st October 1966 in the AU payroll, and when I pull the employee data using the Gem, the date comes across as @date_of_birth=Sun, 04 Mar 1973.

I've changed a sample date employee to the birthdate of 31/10/1966 and the same thing happens.

Haven't checked the other country payroll yet, but I assume they are using the same date conversion routine?

[CyberFerret]

I think the problem here is that the parse_date routine in /lib/xero-ruby/models/payroll_au/employee.rb is working out the date based on the ASP.NET date string, but the seconds_since_epoch is not working out the right date since the Unix epoch of 01 Jan 1970 for any dates prior to that.

def parse_date(datestring)
      if datestring.include?('Date')
        seconds_since_epoch = datestring.scan(/[0-9]+/)[0].to_i / 1000.0
        Time.at(seconds_since_epoch).utc.strftime('%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S%z').to_s
      else # handle date 'types' for small subset of payroll API's
        Time.parse(datestring).strftime('%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S').to_s
      end
    end
 end

Unfortunately, many people in your payroll system (myself included) were born before 1 Jan 1970, so we are getting erroneous data in our HR system. Previously, when manually parsing the XML/JSON data in the old SDK, we used the following Ruby helper method to reliably convert from the ASP.NET date string to a ruby date:

def date_from_asp_net(asp_net_date)
  date_pattern = /\/Date\((-?\d+)(\+\d+)?\)\//
  original, date, timezone = *date_pattern.match(asp_net_date)
  date = (date.to_i / 1000)
  if !timezone.nil?
    z = timezone.to_i
    h = z / 100
    m = z - (h * 100)
    seconds = (h * 3600) + (m * 60)
    date = date + seconds
  end
  DateTime.strptime(date.to_s, "%s")
end

[CyberFerret]

Actually, I think this could be solved if the datestring.scan RegExp pattern can include the '-' character as well as 0-9. This would cater for epoch times in the negative (i.e. before 1 Jan 1970) as I know Ruby's Date.parse will convert that OK, however I am not 100% if the ASP.NET data shows pre 1970 dates as a negative?

[SerKnight]

This triage looks good. Will do my best to get this patched up asap. Do you have a workaround in the interim?

[SerKnight]

Confirmed for my test user born in 1900... 🤔

Working on this asap

[SerKnight]

Fixed in 3.0.0 - thank you for the code samples. Let me know if anything else crops up surrounding this.