[FLOW3-general] DateTime limited to Unix timestamp?

[Michael Sauter]

Hi,

just remembered this thread and thought I could do something about it.

Here's what I would suggest:

As current MySQL and SQLLite databases use only 4 byte for the INTEGER 
type, we can't use that to store all the information that a PHP DateTime 
object can carry (which uses a 64bit integer).

Because of that, one solution would be to store the values as a string 
(as proposed by Martin earlier). The format could be something like 
YYYYMMDDTHHMMSS. That way, ordering/comparison would still work the same 
as it does now with integers.

If timezone handling is needed, that would have to be stored in an extra 
property. It cannot be added to the string if you want to be able to do 
comparisons ... (the comparisons would be incorrect because of daylight 
saving etc.)

The backend should make sure that the date&time string always represents 
the date&time in UTC (to ensure comparisons work and that the stored 
information is independent of the current php configuration).

The only downside I see so far is that current client implementations 
could fail (if you've computed integers in your queries to compare with 
the backend). Maybe there more things that need to be taken into account?

Otherwise, and if the proposed solution sounds good to you, I'm happy to 
provide a patch & push it to gerrit.

~michael