Bug: time attribute is always a string, yet is type casted to string | Date

It appears that time constructor attribute value, which can be Date is always converted to a string:

https://github.com/cloudevents/sdk-javascript/blob/73f0becc2b8e4f10ae40e23b77e4161d9b5ff611/src/event/cloudevent.ts#L91-L95

The setter also converts to a string:

https://github.com/cloudevents/sdk-javascript/blob/73f0becc2b8e4f10ae40e23b77e4161d9b5ff611/src/event/cloudevent.ts#L130-L132

Yet, the value of the getter is type casted to string | Date. This is actually confusing and leads to buggy behavior.

This led me to a wrong conclusion, that if I pass a Date it will remain a Date.

https://github.com/cloudevents/sdk-javascript/blob/73f0becc2b8e4f10ae40e23b77e4161d9b5ff611/src/event/cloudevent.ts#L126

[lance]

@moltar - good catch. All of this conversion with the time attribute is done because the spec for JSON representation of an event specifically requires a string. But I think this is highlighting a deeper issue related to the JSON representation.

When we refactored this repository into TypeScript, there was an effort to create the CloudEvent class in such a way that simply doing console.log(event) would result in a JSON representation adhering to the spec. This breaks down in a few places and is why you see some attribute transformation as in this case.

I think we need to consider the fact that the CloudEvent class has to be explicitly transformed via toString() and JSON.stringify() in order to have a valid JSON representation of an event. We are working on some big API changes for the 4.0.0 version, and I think that this question should be addressed in 4.0. Resolving this, would result in a fix for what you highlight here, as well.

@cloudevents/sdk-javascript-maintainers any thoughts on this?

[moltar]

Thanks! 😃