CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ruby-on-railsrubydatetimeruby-on-rails-4timezone
Luis Javier
Luis Javier

Reputation: 79

How set my timezone correctly to save a record correctly?

In my rails application I'm getting data and saving it by its date for all the records that has the today's date for a later call.

The problem is the data comes in this format "8:05 PM ET"

When I parse it to get it in the date format I get this:

"Mon, 24 Aug 2015 20:05:00 EDT -04:00"

,which is the right date. The thing is when I save it in the database is saved as 

"2015-08-25 00:05:00 UTC"

When I request to the db give me all the data from today it doesn't retrieve this record because the date says that record is 25 "tomorrow"** and not **24 "today".

How can I save that record in my database as today "24" and not as tomorrow "25"?

My configuration:

application.rb 

class Application < Rails::Application
    Dir["#{Rails.root}/lib/**/**/*.rb"].each { |f| require f }
    config.time_zone = 'Eastern Time (US & Canada)'.freeze
    config.active_record.default_timezone = :local
    config.active_record.raise_in_transactional_callbacks = true
end

and before save it:

string = '7:05 PM ET'
datetime = DateTime.now
Time.use_zone('Eastern Time (US & Canada)') do
      datetime = Time.zone.parse(string)
 end
baz.create(time: datetime, foo: 'bar')

when i try to acces it 

baz.where(time:Date.today.to_time.beginning_of_day..Date.today.to_time.end_of_day)

Upvotes: 0

Views: 3574

Answers (3)

K M Rakibul Islam
K M Rakibul Islam

Reputation: 34318

In your database, dates are saved in UTC.

But, if you want to retrieve the dates in your own timezone format, you can specify your timezone in the config/application.rb filelike this:

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

Then, you can do:

time_now =  DateTime.now
time_now_in_my_zone = time_now.in_time_zone(Rails.application.config.time_zone).to_datetime

See ActiveSupport::TimeWithZone

To keep things consistent and saving time in local timezone to database, this has to be set in application.rb

 config.active_record.default_timezone = :local

Default timezone is :utc.

See Configuring Active Record for more options.

So, you can use config.active_record.default_timezone = :local setting to save the date in your local format and retrieve it in your format too, and keep things consistent. I think, this answers your question. Let me know if not!

Update

Change:

Time.use_zone('Eastern Time (US & Canada)') do
      datetime = Time.zone.parse(string)
 end

to:

datetime = Time.now.in_time_zone(Rails.application.config.time_zone).to_datetime
    baz.create(time: datetime, foo: 'bar')

Upvotes: 2

Daniel Batalla
Daniel Batalla

Reputation: 1264

A shorter way to achieve that:

  1. Set config.time_zone in your application.rb file.
  2. Use Time.zone.now to save your records.

Example:
Setting 'Buenos Aires' timezone in a Rails application.rb file.

# Set Time.zone default to the specified zone and make Active Record auto-convert to this zone.
config.time_zone = 'Buenos Aires'

Then you can use this to store the properly Time:
Time.zone.now # => Mon, 24 Aug 2015 13:06:21 ART -03:00

If you want to know what time_zone do you need, you can run this: rake time:zones:all

Hope this help :)

Upvotes: 0

The Fabio
The Fabio

Reputation: 6250

You might want to consider studying a little more about time zones.

in your case Mon, 24 Aug 2015 20:05:00 EDT -04:00 is the same date as 2015-08-25 00:05:00 UTC

UTC means the timezone +00:00

Upvotes: 0

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