Rails/Activerecord database field timezone

Question

I have a database that is written to by a non-rails application and read from by a rails application. There is a datetime field in the database and the data stored in this field is stored in Eastern Time. In my rails app, I understand I can set the application's timezone in my environment.rb file by doing config.time_zone = 'Eastern Time (US & Canada)'. However, rails assumes the data stored in the database is stored in UTC and converts from config.time_zone to UTC as it pulls information in and out of the database.

Is there a way to tell rails the data in this particular field, or even all my datetime fields, is Eastern Time and not UTC?

Answer 1

On Rails 3.0.5 in application.rb, this works:

config.time_zone = 'Central Time (US & Canada)'
config.active_record.default_timezone = :local

Answer 2

config.active_record.default_timezone - Tells ActiveRecord to interpret database times as being in the specified time zone, and to use this timezone for working with the created_at & updated_at attributes.