ThingSpeak: Bug in Data Import related to UTC

I have a bunch of files with hourly data that I need to upload into several ThingSpeak Channels. The CSV-files are formatted according to https://se.mathworks.com/help/thingspeak/channel-data-import.html, and look like this (each file is about 8000 lines):

datetime,field1,field2

2019-03-31 00:00:00 UTC,43,

2019-03-31 01:00:00 UTC,47,

2019-03-31 02:00:00 UTC,61,

2019-03-31 03:00:00 UTC,68,

2019-03-31 04:00:00 UTC,85,

However the upload fails,ThingSpeak claims that there are duplicate data in the CSV file (at this point it would have been super-useful if ThingSpeak could tell me which line had duplicated data, but I had to figure that out by myself - please consider this a feature request!).

Anyway after a while I figured out that the problem was related to the date "2019-03-31". I suddenly understood why - this is the day Daylight Savings Time starts. So, by removing EITHER the line 02:00 or the line 03:00 then the upload works. This sort of makes sense: when daylight savings time starts the clock is advanced from 0200 to 0300, so 0200 and 0300 is actually the same point in time and hence they are overlapping data.

BUT: I am using UTC which does not use daylight savings time - the whole point of UTC is to provide a constant reference. Hence, my time series above should not fail when doing a data import. Try it yourself: create an empty Thingspeak channel, copy/paste the above lines into a file, upload it. It fails. Now try with either 0200 or 0300 deleted. It works.

I could of course write a script that adjusts all times by one hour from March 31 to October 27, but it seems to me that ThingSpeak/Matlab should handle this by properly supporting UTC?

Answer 1

[Vinod]

Thank you for reporting the issue with detailed reproduction steps. We'll looking into resolving this in an upcoming release.

[Håkon Dahle]

Thanks! I will just proceed with the workaround I described above.