Timestamp in EE
Development and Programming
I was wondering why ee stores their dates in a char format, instead of a datetime, or timestamp in MySQL. Is it better? I know it’s converted into a timestamp format, but the column type is not set as that, or am I mistaking in regards to this? I would have thought that setting and using that column type in the DB would have made things better, can I get some info in regards to this?
EE uses a number of date formats, internally, among them UNIX timestamps, or a YYYMMDDhhmmss representation. All this should matter little to the average user, since EE formats its date variables before output.
Yah, I am referring to this in a developer standpoint, why not stick to one format?
Wired, there are a variety of performance and usage reasons for why this was done. At this point, your best option is to work with the formatting as it is while you build. =)
I am developing a few modules, I am going to be storing the date as a timestamp. In a previous post I asked this question, however I didn’t get the response I was looking for.
Anyway i would like to know what would be the benefits of storing this timestamp as a real timestamp in the db, as opposed to “char” type, would I have more or less control? Why is entry_date in the exp_weblog_titles field a char, does this offer more control?
Hi, Wired,
I did not realize that you were asking this as guidance for building your own module. I have merged your posts and am moving these down to the Modules Technical Support forum.
There are mainly legacy reasons, not wanting to change existing behaviors that some users or third party software might rely upon. All newly created date fields use Unix timestamps, because it greatly simplifies things and takes much less work to localize.