Feature request: Asterisk in WMIDateTime support

[ThalusA]

Hi, based on the WMI specification https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/wmisdk/cim-datetime, datetime can use asterisk for unspecified value, would it be possible to treat them as 0 or maybe add something that can handle that ? As of right now it can't handle that.

[ohadravid]

Hi @ThalusA 👋

Can you provide a failing example?

I think it should be possible to support this by adding new enums which can represent the * patterns and defer to the regular deser code otherwise (https://github.com/ohadravid/wmi-rs/blob/main/src/datetime.rs#L13 / https://github.com/ohadravid/wmi-rs/blob/main/src/datetime_time.rs#L17), but that will depend on the exact usecase.

[ThalusA]

The failing example is 20210601114102.**********

[ohadravid]

Can you give an example where you are using this pattern?

[ThalusA]

A proprietary software I use that return to me those values, and based on the WMI specification it tells me that it should be accepted as a valid value.

[ohadravid]

Reading the spec, I think it might be hard even to represent the simpler "range" variant (the "April 1st any year" example seems complex and doesn't have any Rust analog I can think of).

Since even the timezone can be optional, something like WMIDateTimeRange { start: NaiveDateTime, span: ..., tz: Option<FixedOffset> } is a bit strange, and is anyway limited to only asterisks-in-postfix.

Since your example doesn't seem to be valid according to the spec (there should be a +*** at the end for the timezone), I think the best way would be for you to write your own struct WMIDateTimeWithAsterisks(pub DateTime<FixedOffset>) and implement parse as you wish.

If you think the impl is general enough, I'd be happy to accept a PR 😄

[ThalusA]

Understandable, I thought the same thing but I wasn't 100% sure. I might make a PR if I have time in my time-off, for now I just implemented a function to act as the deserializer that deserialize as a string, replace asterisks to zero and then parse it as WMIDateTime