[Check_mk (english)] Downtime Automation

[Dave Ford]

Hi - I've having tremendous trouble trying to automate some actions in
CheckMK.  

I've most achieved what I want to do - that is, to schedule downtime
for a host depending on the result of a local checkMK check. 

The problem I'm having is to check if the scheduled downtime has
already been scheduled for a host.  I was trying to use the
'downtimes_of_host' view, but it doesn't work properly because of the
mixed date view is changing from a proper date to '12 hrs' or similar. 

While I can set the date format to absolute in the gui manually, I
can't work out how to do this with curl. 

Can someone advise on this - otherwise, I'll have to give up entirely
on automation if I can't get check_mk to output dates in machine-
readable format. 

The code I'm using to view the downtime for a host is:
curl -s --get \
--data-urlencode        output_format=JSON \
--data-urlencode        view_name=downtimes_of_host \
--data-urlencode        _username=set-downtime \
--data-urlencode        _secret=...... \
--data-urlencode        _do_actions=yes \
--data-urlencode        _do_confirm=yes \
--data-urlencode        host="${HOSTNAME}" \
--data-urlencode _transid=-1 \
"https://......./check_mk/view.py"

Thanks