Date and DateTime fields, auto_now_add and PostgreSQL

[zloy.alu@…]

PostgreSQL allows using function "now()", "current_date()", "current_time()" in columns. Why does you not use it?

[Luke Plant]

Some reasons:

1. There is no advantage (at least none stated) in using this functionality.
2. It would introduce differences between how it works with Postgres and other databases, which would only complicate things.
3. It would require additional code paths just to detect which DB backend we are running.

Thanks!

[Malcolm Tredinnick]

For future reference (in case we ever revisit this): although the functions provided by PostgreSQL are non-standard and not supported across all backends, PostgreSQL, along with all SQL-compliant dbs, provide constant-like functions CURRENT_TIMESTAMP, CURRENT_DATE, etc, that provide the same functionality. What I don't know at the moment (and aren't motivated to check right this minute) is if there are any backends we support which don't implement this part of the SQL standard.

Note, however, that this doesn't make this bug a laydown "accept". There are advantages to implementing auto_now and auto_now_add in Python -- it allows them to be overridden as part of the saving process (for timezone adjustments in some funky situation, for example).

[Jacob]

Milestone 1.3 deleted