Tracy, Sorry for the delay, just got back from a short vacation. Thanks very much for your clarification. I think I now understand how to proceed!
On Sep 7, 8:06 pm, Tracy Reed <tr...@ultraviolet.org> wrote: > On Thu, Sep 03, 2009 at 03:48:14PM -0700, Margie spake thusly: > > > What is the default when using a django DateTimeField? Does it not > > save it in UTC? If it is not saving it in UTC, what is it saving it > > in? > > Python has two kinds of DateTime objects: naive and > non-naive. Non-naive has timezone information with it. But the Django > DateTimeField can only handle naive DateTime objects since MySQL > cannot store time zones. So anytime you assign a time to a > DateTimeField you have to convert it to a standard timezone and UTC is > the most logical choice. > > > I thought that one of the things the DateTimeField did for you > > was convert your input (whether form a user typed input or from a > > server call to datetime.datetime.now ()) into some sort of internal > > representation (UTC?). > > I think it would be nice if it did this automatically since that is > the only thing that makes sense but it does not. Maybe someone out > there is able to be 100% sure that their data will always be the same > timezone so they don't want to inconvenience them by forcing > everything to UTC so they have to do a conversion to localtime when > they get their data back out. But I think such cases are exceedingly > rare. So we are all stuck converting to UTC before doing a .save() on > our models. > > > I thought that when I was using the date filter, that it was simply > > converting that internal representation into my specificied text > > format. Am I confused here? > > It does that but it does not do any timezone conversions. > > > I thought about putting the timezone in the profile but that does have > > the disadvantage that if the user travels, they would have to update > > their profile to get dates displayed in whatever location they are > > at. I really don't like that since the people that will be using my > > app are management, and they often travel (and probably won't want to > > modify their profile all the time). > > There is no way around this afaik. They need to learn to do timezone > conversions in their head or set a timezone in their profile. I label > the timezone displayed prominently so they know to make the adjustment > or change their profile. > > -- > Tracy Reedhttp://tracyreed.org > > application_pgp-signature_part > < 1KViewDownload --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Django users" group. To post to this group, send email to django-users@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to django-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/django-users?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
