Rails and created_at

Question

Hi all!

I do:

Order.find(:all, :conditions => "created_at>='#{DateTime.now.year}-#{month}-1' and created_at<='#{Date.new(DateTime.now.year, month.to_i, -1)}'")

That is working fine except that everything created on the last day of the month is not included. Created_at might contain: "2010-09-30 18:34:09". That is NOT less than or equal to "2010-09-30". I know that I could just change the method to this:

Order.find(:all, :conditions => "created_at>='#{DateTime.now.year}-#{month}-1' and created_at<='#{Date.new(DateTime.now.year, month.to_i, -1)} 23:59:59'")

...but that seems kind of wrong. Is there a smarter way to do it?

Answer 1

That would be the right way to do it, IMHO. The representation of a time as 2010-09-30 18:34:09 is conceptually just a human-friendly display of a single number. So think of it as doing comparisons against a number. Therefore it makes sense to be explicit about the minimum and maximum values of the number in question.

Answer 2

This might not solve your issue but you should make use of Rails' Ruby extensions here. You can do things like 1.month.ago which will return a DateTime object representing the current date minus 1 month.

Other methods you might expect are defined as well. 4.days.from_now, 3.days.since(Date.yesterday), etc.

Answer 3

Or you could use

< Date.today.next_month.beginning_of_month

to get everything less than the next month.