R – How to store year in Rails app

database-designdatetimeruby-on-rails

I want to just store the year in one of my models. At the moment I just have a database field called year of type date, but it seems to want to take a whole date (yyyy-mm-dd) rather than just a year.

What's the best way to store this? In a date field but using some way of just getting it to store the date bit (in which case, how?), or in an int field, or a string field or what? In some ways using an int field feels wrong, but it might be the easiest.

Best Solution

It depends on the range of dates that are possible. If your dates go from BC to far future (negative to more then 4 digits), it would be easiest to store an integer (just for sorting reasons). This is also true if you want to make calculations or compare dates.

Otherwise I would probably go with a string.

Using a date field use January 1st and extract the year part when showing.

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C# – How to calculate someone’s age based on a DateTime type birthday

An easy to understand and simple solution.

// Save today's date.
var today = DateTime.Today;

// Calculate the age.
var age = today.Year - birthdate.Year;

// Go back to the year in which the person was born in case of a leap year
if (birthdate.Date > today.AddYears(-age)) age--;

However, this assumes you are looking for the western idea of the age and not using East Asian reckoning.

Sql – How to return only the Date from a SQL Server DateTime datatype

SELECT DATEADD(dd, 0, DATEDIFF(dd, 0, @your_date))

for example

SELECT DATEADD(dd, 0, DATEDIFF(dd, 0, GETDATE()))

gives me

2008-09-22 00:00:00.000

Pros:

No varchar<->datetime conversions required
No need to think about locale

Best Solution

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C# – How to calculate someone’s age based on a DateTime type birthday

Sql – How to return only the Date from a SQL Server DateTime datatype

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