Automatic Time Stamps
Let Wheels handle time stamping of records.
When working with database tables, it is very common to have a column that holds the time that the record was added or last modified. If you have an e-commerce website with an orders table, you want to store the date and time the order was made; if you run a blog, you want to know when someone left a comment; and so on.
As with anything that is a common task performed by many developers, it makes a good candidate for abstracting to the framework level. So that's what we did.
Columns Used for Timestamps
If you have either of the following columns in your database table, Wheels will see them and treat them a little differently than others.
createdAt
Wheels will use a createdAt column automatically to store the current date and time when an INSERT operation is made (which could happen through a save() or create() operation, for example).
updatedAt
If Wheels sees an updatedAt column, it will use it to store the current date and time automatically when an UPDATE operation is made (which could happen through a save() or update() operation, for example).
Data Type of Columns
If you add any of these columns to your table, make sure they can accept date/time values (like datetime or timestamp, for example) and that they can be set to null.
Comments
Read and submit questions, clarifications, and corrections about this chapter.
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Can we drop the 'At' in the names to just 'created' and 'modified'?
Chris, you can do so by adding these configurations to your file at config/settings.cfm:
<cfset set(timeStampOnCreateProperty="created")>
<cfset set(timeStampOnUpdateProperty="modified")>
The page about naming conventions says "In your database, both table names and column names should be lowercase. The customersegments table could have fields called title, regionid, and incomelevel, for example."
However, this page seems to indicate the createdAt and updatedAt columns in my database should use camel case. Should they really be createdat and updatedat? Also should foreign key references be camel case i.e. userId or all lowercase i.e. userid?
Chris T,
The columns should all be lowercase, not camel case. If you're using the DBMigrate plugin (after version 0.4.0) the columns will be all lowercase, prior to that they were camelCase. Me thinks this document needs to be updated to show them in all lowercase.