How to accept date and datetime into the same field

Questions / Help
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1

Hey I would need to save these 2 types of dates into one field

"start_date": "2019-10-18",
"start_date": "2019-10-18T20:00:00+02"

as you can see one is a date and the other is a datetime.
what’s the best way to go about this?
maybe convert them into something else?
and then transform them back when i want to return them?

2

this doesn’t sound so good… maybe store them in seperate fields?

3

If You need to keep time info, then convert Date to DateTime, if You don’t, convert DateTime to Date. Anyway, it’s not good practice to do

2 types of dates into one field

4

As others said, it is likely a bad idea, but assuming you have to handle such input for reasons beyond your control, you can always trying parsing as one and then fallback to the other. I am not sure which order is best but here is an example:

case Date.from_iso8601(maybe_datetime) do
  {:ok, date} -> convert_date_to_datetime(...)
  {:error, _} ->
    case NaiveDateTime.from_iso(maybe_datetime) do
      {:ok, naive} -> convert_naive_to_datetime(...)
      {:error, _} -> ...
    end
end
3 Likes
5

yes, i am trying to push back on this, but not my call at the end of the day, thanks for the suggestion!