How to put timedelta in django model?

Question

With inspectdb I was able to get a "interval" field from postgres into django. In Django, it was a TextField. The object that I retrieved was indeed a timedelta object!

Now I want to put this timedelta object in a new model. What's the best way to do this? Because putting a timedelta in a TextField results in the str version of the object...

Answer 1

Since Django 1.8 you can use DurationField.

Answer 2

You can trivially normalize a timedelta to a single floating-point number in days or seconds.

Here's the "Normalize to Days" version.

float(timedelta.days) + float(timedelta.seconds) / float(86400) 

You can trivially turn a floating-point number into a timedelta.

>>> datetime.timedelta(2.5) datetime.timedelta(2, 43200) 

So, store your timedelta as a float.

Here's the "Normalize to Seconds" version.

timedelta.days*86400+timedelta.seconds 

Here's the reverse (using seconds)

datetime.timedelta( someSeconds/86400 )