title: Can I force Azure Tablestorage to return an ETag of constant length?
body: <p>I recently started working on some testing for Azure TableStorage, and one thing I noticed is that they are apparently doing some weird timestamping for their ETags.</p>
  
  <p>I would like to check something related to the exact byte limitations of data upload, but the problem seems to be that this is hardly reliable as the entity can sporadically get too big or too small as well.</p>
  
  <p>The problem is:</p>
  
  <p>ETags are apparently timestamped, but they are not timestamped <em>consistently</em>.</p>
  
  <p>Depending on whether you hit a certain precision in the millisecond range, you might end up with a tag like this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>W/\"datetime'2018-11-27T07%3A58%3A29.5163963Z'\"
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>or like this</p>
  
  <pre><code>W/\"datetime'2018-11-27T07%3A58%3A29.65348Z'\"
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Considering the calculation formula for ETag size being:</p>
  
  <pre><code>BaseSize (8) + Property name length * 2 ("ETag" -&gt; 8) + 4 + ETag.length *2
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>This can cause differences in the size of the whole entity.</p>
  
  <p>Setting a constant ETag myself before performing a TableOperation is also not possible, as the storage endpoint seems to overwrite it anyways.</p>
  
  <p>Is there any way to force the precision on these values to be constant?</p>