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POThe woes of (sometimes) storing "date only" in datetimes
 

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  1. POThe woes of (sometimes) storing "date only" in datetimes
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    <p>We have two fields <code>from</code> and <code>to</code> (of type <code>datetime</code>), where the user can store the begin time and the end time of a business trip, e.g.:</p> <pre><code>From: 2010-04-14 09:00 To: 2010-04-16 16:30 </code></pre> <p>So, the duration of the trip is 2 days and 7.5 hours.</p> <p>Often, the exact times are not known in advance, so the user enters the dates without a time:</p> <pre><code>From: 2010-04-14 To: 2010-04-16 </code></pre> <p>Internally, this is stored as <code>2010-04-14 00:00</code> and <code>2010-04-16 00:00</code>, since that's what most modern class libraries (e.g. .net) and databases (e.g. SQL Server) do when you store a "date only" in a datetime structure. Usually, this makes perfect sense.</p> <p>However, when entering <code>2010-04-16</code> as the <code>to</code> date, the user clearly did <em>not</em> mean <code>2010-04-16 00:00</code>. Instead, the user meant <code>2010-04-16 24:00</code>, i.e., calculating the duration of the trip should output <code>3 days</code>, not <code>2 days</code>.</p> <p>I can think of a few (more or less ugly) workarounds for this problem (add "23:59" in the UI layer of the <code>to</code> field if the user did not enter a time component; add a special "dates are full days" Boolean field; store "2010-04-17 00:00" in the DB but display "2010-04-16 24:00" to the user if the time component is "00:00"; ...), all having advantages and disadvantages. Since I assume that this is a fairly common problem, I was wondering:</p> <ul> <li>Is there a "standard" best-practice way of solving it?</li> <li>If there isn't, have you experienced a similar requirement, how did you solve it and what were the pros/cons of that solution?</li> </ul>
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    1. CODo you use these dates only to calculate duration? If so, then you could replace the `to` field with `duration`, e.g. `x hours y minutes`. AFAIK databases have interval data types for this purpose.
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