how to represent date type in apache thrift

Question

I'm developing a service using apache thrift and I need to define periods of time. Dates are significant (YYYY-mm-dd) and time should be totally omitted (HH:ii:ss). I couldn't find any specific date/datetime thrift data type so I'm thinking about two approaches:

1. more complex

   int year,
   int month,
   int day,
   

2. less complex but includes time of day part which I don't need.

   int timestamp
   

Is there a common thrift approach to represent date(time) types?

Answer 1

I don't think there is a date representation on Thrift IDL. We use this notation for our projects.

typedef string Timestamp

then use that notation on subsequent model which needs a timestamp usage like this

struct blah{

    /**
    * TODO:list what notation this dateTime represents. eg ISO-8601
    * or if its in the format like YYYY-mm-DD you mentioned.
    */
    1:Timestamp dateTime;

    }

String makes it easier to use JODA Operations

--EDIT--

I don't know what timestamp you intend to store. For instance if you want to calculate current instance a transaction has occurred and store it into that thrift object, you can do this with Joda.

    String timestamp = new DateTime().toString("YYYY-MM-dd"); //2013-03-26 This will be string value generated. It will convert the current time to format you seek to output.
    //Use the generated thrift object.
    Blah newblah = new Blah();
    blah.setDateTime(timestamp);

Answer 2

I'm not aware of some specific format preference. I usually use decimal encoded date representation, since it's quite compact and human-readable, like this: 20130325