CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ruby-on-railsrails-activerecord
Linus
Linus

Reputation: 4783

Why does an ActiveRecord object return DateTime.now differently than DateTime.now

Say I have a simple ActiveRecord model with this example schema:

  create_table "users", id: :serial do |t|
    t.datetime "updated_at"
  end

When I run the following code in the console:

user = User.new
user.updated_at = DateTime.now
user.updated_at # => Thu, 27 Feb 2020 09:28:51 GMT +00:00

My question is: why this output is different than the normal return value of DateTime.now, which is

DateTime.now # => Thu, 27 Feb 2020 10:28:51 +0100

Is there some kind of serializer involved? How can I find out more about this?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 31

Answers (2)

Muhammad Elbadawy
Muhammad Elbadawy

Reputation: 341

add your time zone in your config/application.rb inside the 

class Application < Rails::Application

.......
# it will be like this
    config.time_zone = "Asia/Riyadh"
.....
end

Upvotes: 0

Adim
Adim

Reputation: 1776

AR updated_at/created_at are time zone aware attributes. You can read more about them here:

https://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveRecord/Timestamp.html

If you grab a User record for instance, and call time_zone_aware_types on it, you'll get the timezone aware column types

user = User.first
user.time_zone_aware_types

=> [:datetime, :time]

These types of columns are automatically converted to Time.zone when retrieved from the database even though they are stored in UTC.

The difference with DateTime.now is that it's not timezone aware and just returns the time in UTC

Upvotes: 1

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