Suggestion - Identify time-column by field-name rather than value

[jordanmews]

Hello, first off, I'd like to thank you for this plugin 👍 . I think graphing arbitrary rows of json from an HTTP endpoint should be part of the core grafana product.

Problem

While trying to add a single-value to a stat panel, I was surprised by the automatic attribution of the type:time to my value since it met the conditions (length of 10 or 13 etc.. ). I tried working around it through the various override options in the grafana GUI but found none and resorted to modifying my data from the backend (to not be of length 10 or 13).

Suggested solution

My suggestion would be to just use the field-name "time" instead. This is how grafana natively identifies the time column, so it would make queries more portable and reduce UX surprises.

Thanks again for the plugin.

[PreinfalkG]

Also from me a big THANK YOU for this plugin !!!

I think I have the same problem.
I have a smart meter which provides countless measured values as JSON
The JSON data source interprets the measured value once as 'number type' and one query later as 'time type'.
Note: The decimal places of the measured values from the smart meter are different for each query

Screenshot:

Screenshot - one query laster:

Here a short screen video ...
https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/16906959/103399791-f8dba100-4b42-11eb-8ab2-c5c347c780ec.mp4

[marcusolsson]

Thank you for the kind words, and for taking the time to post your feedback!

The time detection is definitely a bit naïve at the moment. Selecting a property to use as the time column assumes a visualization that only uses one time field, such as the Graph panel. Other visualizations could potentially require several time fields, e.g. start and end time.

I'm leaning towards adding a Type drop-down for each JSON Path query where you can explicitly specify how to parse the type, e.g. string, number, time. This would solve another feature request where numeric values are quoted.

The issue pointed out by @PreinfalkG however is a bug and should be fairly easy to sort out in the meantime.

[PreinfalkG]

Thank you for your feedback.
The solution with the type drop-down would be perfect!