Timestamp fields in django

Question

I have a MySQL database, right now I'm generating all of the datetime fields as models.DateTimeField. Is there a way to get a timestamp instead? I want to be able to autoupdate on create and update etc.

The documentation on django doesn't have this?

Answer 1

There was actually a very good and informative article on this. Here: http://ianrolfe.livejournal.com/36017.html

The solution on the page is slightly deprecated, so I did the following:

from django.db import models from datetime import datetime from time import strftime  class UnixTimestampField(models.DateTimeField):     """UnixTimestampField: creates a DateTimeField that is represented on the     database as a TIMESTAMP field rather than the usual DATETIME field.     """     def __init__(self, null=False, blank=False, **kwargs):         super(UnixTimestampField, self).__init__(**kwargs)         # default for TIMESTAMP is NOT NULL unlike most fields, so we have to         # cheat a little:         self.blank, self.isnull = blank, null         self.null = True # To prevent the framework from shoving in "not null".      def db_type(self, connection):         typ=['TIMESTAMP']         # See above!         if self.isnull:             typ += ['NULL']         if self.auto_created:             typ += ['default CURRENT_TIMESTAMP on update CURRENT_TIMESTAMP']         return ' '.join(typ)      def to_python(self, value):         if isinstance(value, int):             return datetime.fromtimestamp(value)         else:             return models.DateTimeField.to_python(self, value)      def get_db_prep_value(self, value, connection, prepared=False):         if value==None:             return None         # Use '%Y%m%d%H%M%S' for MySQL < 4.1         return strftime('%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S',value.timetuple()) 

To use it, all you have to do is: timestamp = UnixTimestampField(auto_created=True)

In MySQL, the column should appear as: 'timestamp' timestamp NOT NULL DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP ON UPDATE CURRENT_TIMESTAMP,

Only drawback with this is that it only works on MySQL databases. But you can easily modify it for others.