Django model DateTimeField from an ISO8601 timestamp string

Question

Django newbie here. I am crafting a Django model for a SQLite database with string timestamps, e.g. 2014-09-23T18:43:26.692Z. Because I would like to eventually use Django's filtering engine for queries (instead of using strftime), I want my model to generate DateTimeField objects from ISO strings. If I try to declare a DateTimeField on the raw DB field like this

startTime = models.DateTimeField(db_column='startTime')

I get an error: 'unicode' object has no attribute 'isoformat'

I did some digging and tried the following code:

startTime = models.DateTimeField(dateutil.parser.parse(models.TextField(db_column='startTime'))

But now the error is AttributeError: 'TextField' object has no attribute 'read'. What am I doing wrong? Is this even the right approach?

Answer 1

Since nobody bothered to answer this and it showed up at the top of a Google search, here's to save some extra searching.. As someone mentioned Django's own dateparse module is best for the job and converts ISO8601 and many other formats to Python's datetime.datetime object. Also it's timezone aware and hence ideal for Django projects.

from django.utils import dateparse

x = '2014-09-23T18:43:26.692Z'
y = dateparse.parse_datetime(x)
print y

And voila..!

2014-09-23 18:43:26.692000+00:00

Answer 2

It seems in Django 1.11, we could just assign a ISO format string to DateTimeField . like the following shows.

Lesson.objects.create(starttime='2017-04-20T12:01:00.000Z',
                      endtime  ='2017-04-20T13:01:00.000Z')