Hi all,
Is it possibly to query the system time of a VMS in UTC using one of the SDKs or APIs? If querying local time is possible but not in UTC, is it also possible to query timezone information?
Thanks in advance and apologies if this is in the wrong place.
Simon
Could you elaborate on what do you mean by system time of a VMS and why do you need it for? Regarding time zone information, you can get it using MIP VMS RESTful Config API - see here.
Thanks for your reply, I’ll elaborate on the use case and hopefully it will make my query clearer.
We’re intending to use this as part of a CCTV Health Check feature which checks various things including the time of a device (be it a camera, DVR/NVR or VMS). This is in the context of an alarm receiving center which needs to be alerted if the clock time has drifted.
So in this context what I mean by the system time of the VMS is the time of the operating system of the VMS itself, which I would assume is used as the basis for all time-related aspects of a VMS (e.g. date-times on reported alarms, status messages and so on).
I hope this makes sense, let me know if you have any follow-up questions. I should say that if directly querying time is not possible, we would be quite happy with an indirect way of inferring the system time via another request if this were possible.
There is no way through any of the APIs or services in Milestone that you can ask for the system time of the server. As a workaround you might be able to develop and run a service like that in the server.
Thanks for confirming this. We’ve managed to find another workaround, which is to create a user defined event (giving it a dummy name of “Time Query”) and trigger it when we need to. The response contains the date-time in UTC of the system. It isn’t ideal, but at least we have a way to do it. Thanks again for your help.
I find it very creative that you found this way to workaround. Thank you for sharing this idea.