In one of the Rails projects I’m involved with, we do most of the local development against SQLite and then deploy against Oracle. This is a bit annoying for many reasons, but by far the largest cause of trouble is the handling of dates. I haven’t exactly figured out the rules, but for some reason sometimes Oracle returns DateTime in situations where SQLite returns a Date. This usually causes quite subtle problems that have effects in other parts of the application. This brings me to the small piece of advice I wanted to talk about in this column. Always make sure that you know if you are working with a Date, a Time or a DateTime, since these all have slightly different behavior, especially when it comes to comparisons.
The rule is quite simple. If you think you can have a Time object, make sure to turn it into a DateTime object before trying to compare it to a Date object. What happens otherwise? Unfunny things:
Date.today < Time.now #ArgumentError: comparison of Date with Time failed Time.now > Date.today #true Time.now == Date.today #false Date.today == Time.now #nil Date.today <=> Time.now #nil Date.today != Time.now #true
The first time I saw some of these results, I was a bit confused. Especially the last three. But they do make a twisted kind of sense. Namely, it’s OK for the <=> operator to return nil if it can’t do a comparison between two objects. And the != in Ruby is hardcoded to return the inverse of the value returned from ==, and the since nil is a falsey value, the inverse of that becomes true.
What I wanted to mention with these things is that you should always make sure you don’t have the Date on the left hand side of a comparison. Or if you want to do a comparison, explicitly call to_date to coerce them. Finally, if you want to do date and time comparisons, I find the best behavior usually comes from coercing both sides with to_datetime before doing the comparison.
