Unable to connect to the settings API to get the timezone

[Amit-GH]

My skill is working fine except that it is not able to call the settings API successfully to get the timezone. I saw that this issue was mentioned in this closed issue too but was not fixed. I am pasting the line of code below that give error.

# get device id
device_id = handler_input.request_envelope.context.system.device.device_id

# get Alexa settings API information
sys_object = handler_input.request_envelope.context.system
api_endpoint = sys_object.api_endpoint
api_access_token = sys_object.api_access_token

# construct systems API timezone url
url = '{api_endpoint}/v2/devices/{device_id}/settings/System.timeZone'.format(
     api_endpoint=api_endpoint, device_id=device_id
)
headers = {'Authorization': 'Bearer ' + api_access_token}

userTimeZone = ""
try:
    r = requests.get(url, headers=headers)
    res = r.json()
    logger.info("Device API result: {}".format(str(res)))
    userTimeZone = res
except Exception as exp:
    logger.error('Got error in getting timezone: {}'.format(str(exp)))
    handler_input.response_builder.speak("There was a problem getting the timezone.")
    return handler_input.response_builder.response

My code always goes into the catch block. I have put a log statement there which prints Got error in getting timezone: Expecting value: line 1 column 1 (char 0) in cloudwatch.

Through this open pull-request I thought that the Settings API is not supported for Alexa simulator but the documentation states that getting timeZone is supported. So, I wonder what is the issue.

[Amit-GH]

There is another issue created for the same problem #41 . The workaround for this is to hard-code the timezone for e.g. userTimeZone = "America/New_York" and avoid making the API call altogether. This is definitely not desirable especially when the tutorial tells us to do otherwise.

To improve customer experience, either make changes in the module readme to explicitly say that this doesn't work for python (not sure about node.js) so that we do not spend time beating around the bush.

[aszk]

Sorry for the late reply. I couldn't reproduce with the sample code. Could you tell me how I can reproduced the issue? I tried simulator and device and both worked fine.

[aszk]

Closing due to inactivity.