Updating an object to Azure Table Storage - is there any way to get the new Timestamp?

Question

I'm updating an object in AzureTableStorage using the StorageClient library with

    context.UpdateObject(obj);
    context.SaveChangesWithRetries(obj);

when I do this, is there any way to get hold of the new timestamp for obj without making another request to the server?

Thanks

Stuart

Answer 1

To supplement Seva Titov's answer: the excerpt reported was valid at least until May 2013, but as of November 2013 it has changed (emphasis added):

The Timestamp property is a DateTime value that is maintained on the server side to record the time an entity was last modified. The Table service uses the Timestamp property internally to provide optimistic concurrency. The value of Timestamp is a monotonically increasing value, meaning that each time the entity is modified, the value of Timestamp increases for that entity. This property should not be set on insert or update operations (the value will be ignored).

Now the Timestamp property is no longer regarded as opaque and it is documented that its value increases after each edit -- this suggests that could Timestamp could be now used to track subsequent updates (at least with regard to the single entity).

Nevertheless, as of November 2013 it is still needed another request to Table Storage to obtain the new timestamp when you update the entity (see the documentation of Update Entity REST method). Only when inserting an entity the REST service returns the entire entity with the timestamp (but I don't remember if this is exposed by the StorageClient/Windows Azure storage library).