Why does Rails always display a datetime as 1/1/2000 - with the correct time

Question

This one is driving me nuts!! The data is getting stored into the db (sqlite3) correctly. However, when I display the date from the record, Rails appears to coerce it to 1/1/2000 - with the correct time. In other words, if I specify this as the date time: December 31, 2009 6:00 PM, sqllite3 will in fact show 2009-12-31 18:00:00. But.... Rails will display the value has January 1, 2000 06:00 PM (keeping the correct time).

I have created virtual attributes to handle date formatting (which appear to work correctly). And, I have set my time zone to:

config.time_zone = 'Eastern Time (US & Canada)'

I have to believe this is something simple...It is totally driving me nuts!!

Thanks!

John

Answer 1

Well... I found the problem. As it turned out, when rails created the table, it did so using the Time data type. While the date portion of a datetime value will be stored in a time field, it would appear that when reading a time field, rails only considers the time portion.

The fix.. In desperation, I modified the column to be of datetime type. That fixed it.

John

Answer 2

I had the same problem, using postgres, and thanks user145110 for the suggestion to use the DateTime class instead of Time. That worked for me. I would only add that though I had to change my migration to use DateTime, I was still able to use Time and its methods in tests that compared against DateTime values. In other words, with this original migration:

t.time :start_time

...and sample assignment using Time:

start_time = Time.now.beginning_of_day

...it saved ok, but upon reading it later, the year was changed to 2000. Maybe it's an old Y2K bug. LOL. Instead, I simply changed the migration:

t.datetime  :start_time

..and all my code worked. Even assignments like this work:

start_time = Time.zone.now.beginning_of_year.beginning_of_day

I can't help feeling like I missing something, though. Do others use Time to manipulate dates?