Location Services

For a research project, our team is trying to mine the information from the ALE API (in estimation mode) for our own collection and analysis, and when looking at the documentation for the polled location API, there is no description of what the returned epoch timestamp (ts) means. Does it mean the time of the API invocation response? The time of some other event within the system?

It has to be something interesting, because it seems to only sporadically get bumped (at least for the location API)

Our software was designed with the idea that the location API ts meant that this was the time of the invocation response, but that doesn't seem to be true, because we're seeing MANY of the same ts values from calls spaced out a minute apart.

More generally, the "ts" field appears in many API responses and I can't find the documentation on what the timestamp is trying to convey. Yes, I know that it's a *nix epoch time, but for what?

Any clues?

Thank you for your time,

Ed Kiefer

All:

After a meeting with Aruba/HPE Engineering about this particular topic (ts semantics), I can give somewhat of an explanation about what the ts epoch value represents. If anybody out there wants to sharpen up what's being written here, be my guest.

The ALE location ts value represents a grab bag of a number of different events which somewhat depend on how your version of ALE is configured. From a high level, ts reflects a change to ANY value in the ALE location response payload, not just the location. But if nothing changes, then the ts value doesn't change.  Not what was expected, but we're working around it.