Date helper bug?

I’ve found an issue when trying to use the time_ago_in_words and
distance_of_time_in_words from action view’s date_helper.rb

Using SQL Server, I have a datetime column that gets returned as:
“2007/02/21 09:54:00”. When I pass this to time_ago_in_words (which
just passes on to distance_of_time_in_words) it miscalculates the
difference as “9 hours” (…um yeah, it was 10:54 when I tested this),
when the difference should have been “1 hour”. So I fired up script/
console to see what was going on…

setting up to use the date_helpers…

helper.extend ApplicationHelper
=> #Object:0x391bfd8

my record from SQL server returns time like this…

t.updated_on
=> "“2007/02/20 15:09:04"”

t.updated_on.class
=> String

so make a string in same format that represents ~1 hour ago…

nine_54 = “2007/02/21 09:54:00”
=> “2007/02/21 09:54:00”

see what the helper gives me… (about 1 hour difference from

Time.now)

helper.time_ago_in_words(nine_54)
=> “about 9 hours”

looking at date_helper.rb I see that parameters passed in are called

with to_time method…

nine_54.to_time
=> Wed Feb 21 09:54:00 UTC 2007

Time.now.to_time
=> Wed Feb 21 11:04:34 Pacific Standard Time 2007

A ha! So we’re off by the difference in time zones between PST and

UTC (GMT?). So poking around a bit more…

Time.parse(nine_54)
=> Wed Feb 21 09:54:00 Pacific Standard Time 2007

Success!

So in my view, all I have to do to get the correct time is use
time_ago_in_words(Time.parse(updated_on)) for it to work.

So is this a bug? It is correctly parsing the difference in the times
when considering the time zone differences, but what about the
difference between Time.parse and to_time? Shouldn’t these return the
same answer?

What about the datetime from SQL server? Is the value in the db stored
with tzone info, or is to_time just assuming a defualt tzone of UTC?

On Feb 21, 2007, at 2:53 PM, kreiggers wrote:

I’ve found an issue when trying to use the time_ago_in_words and
distance_of_time_in_words from action view’s date_helper.rb

Using SQL Server, I have a datetime column that gets returned as:
“2007/02/21 09:54:00”. When I pass this to time_ago_in_words (which
just passes on to distance_of_time_in_words) it miscalculates the
difference as “9 hours” (…um yeah, it was 10:54 when I tested this),
when the difference should have been “1 hour”. So I fired up script/
console to see what was going on…

So is this a bug? It is correctly parsing the difference in the times
when considering the time zone differences, but what about the
difference between Time.parse and to_time? Shouldn’t these return the
same answer?

What about the datetime from SQL server? Is the value in the db stored
with tzone info, or is to_time just assuming a defualt tzone of UTC?

In your config/environment.rb, find and uncomment:

Make Active Record use UTC-base instead of local time

config.active_record.default_timezone = :utc

So your database times will be UTC.

-Rob

Rob B. http://agileconsultingllc.com
[email protected]

On Feb 21, 6:04 pm, Rob B. [email protected]
wrote:

In your config/environment.rb, find and uncomment:

Make Active Record use UTC-base instead of local time

config.active_record.default_timezone = :utc

So your database times will be UTC.

The times coming out of the database are already coming out as UTC
when they’re really PST times… i.e. PST time input → stored in db -

rails retrieves a UTC time, all along the only thing that changes in
this is the tzone (0900 Feb 21 2007 PST → database → 0900 Feb 21
2007 UTC).

I don’t have control of the data in the database. All I can do is read
the data. Can I force the dates to come out as PST?