Storing UTC Dates

[Heston James - Cold Beans]

Hello Guys,

 

This might seem like a bit of a naive question but I’m looking for your advice. Being from the UK we operate on Daylight Savings Time which gives us a one hour offset on times for a few months of the year.

 

I currently have a DateTime column which is declared like so:

 

    created = Column(DateTime, default=func.now())

    modified = Column(DateTime, default=func.now(), onupdate=func.now())

 

Which generally works very well, when I create a record it inserts the current locale time into the column, however, it stores the datetime with DST applied too it. As I use the datetime at a later point for posting over web services I really need to store the UTC version of now() in the database, without DST applied to it.

 

How can I modify the above column definition to do this? Can I simply use something instead of func.now()? I was given the advise to use func.now() by someone but not really sure what it returns, is it a datetime.datetime object? Or a time tuple?

 

Or is there a parameter I can pass to Column() or DateTime() which will ensure it uses the UTC format of the date when creating and modifying records?

 

Many thanks guys,

 

Heston

[Werner F. Bruhin]

Heston,

IIUC func.now is a database function.

You should be able to use datetime instead i.e.:

created = Column(DateTime, default=datetime.datetime.utcnow)

modified = Column(DateTime, default=datetime.datetime.utcnow,
onupdate=datetime.datetime.utcnow)

Werner

[Heston James - Cold Beans]

Hi Werner,

> IIUC func.now is a database function.

Ah, ok, that makes fair sense.

> You should be able to use datetime instead i.e.:
>
> created = Column(DateTime, default=datetime.datetime.utcnow)
>
> modified = Column(DateTime, default=datetime.datetime.utcnow,
> onupdate=datetime.datetime.utcnow)

Yes, this worked just great Werner, I've used that and it seems to have done
the job! I hoped it would be that simple :-)

Thanks again,

Heston