Really Small XML Durations

[Brent Putman]

On 6/7/17 5:54 PM, Brent Putman wrote:
>
>
> As to whether the various libraries that we use actually parse and
> use that correctly, I can't confirm with certainty without going and
> looking and/or testing.  But I would say that if you're doing it and
> it's now throwing an error, that's a good sign.

The relevant Java API is
javax.xml.datatype.DatatypeFactory#newDuration(String), which is just
the base class API. The docs say that:

     * <p>The XML Schema specification states that values can be of an
arbitrary size.
     * Implementations may chose not to or be incapable of supporting
arbitrarily large and/or small values.
     * An {@link UnsupportedOperationException} will be thrown with a
message indicating implementation limits
     * if implementation capacities are exceeded.</p>

Actual behavior will be determined by the actual Java runtime class
implementing that API .

So if you're not seeing an UOE being thrown, then either your Java
runtime's impl of that API supports the decimal sub-second precision,
or it's horribly broken.

Beyond that: the duration value generally gets converted by Shib
software to milliseconds (either a primitive long or java.lang.Long
type). The docs for
javax.xml.datatype.Duration#getTimeInMillis(Calendar) say:

     * <p>If the seconds field carries more digits than milli-second order,
     * those will be simply discarded (or in other words, rounded to zero.)

So be mindful of and avoid values smaller than PT0.001S or with more
decimal precision than 3 places. 
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