How to handle expired items?

Question

My site allows users to post things on the site with an expiry date. Once the item has expired, it will no longer be displayed in the listings. Posts can also be closed, canceled, or completed. I think it would be be nicest just to be able to check for one attribute or status ("is active") rather than having to check for [is not expired, is not completed, is not closed, is not canceled]. Handling the rest of those is easy because I can just have one "status" field which is essentially an enum, but AFAIK, it's impossible to set the status to "expired" as soon as that time occurs. How do people typically handle this?

Edit: I'm not asking how to write a query to find expired items; I'm asking how I can find the "active" (unexpired items that meet a few other boolean conditions) without having to use a big nasty query every time I want to find them.

Answer 1

Make the item have birth and death (type:date) columns and a status column (completed, removed, to be expired...).

Update/fill the death column when you want to logically end the lifecycle of an item (for whatever reason: expiry, completed, ...). Update the status column accordingly.

Querying for active items (in pseudo-SQL):

select * from mytable where birth <= todays_date <= death or death is null

Answer 2

It sounds like the expiration date/time is the field that you need to actually store and make decisions based off of. IsActive sounds like something you would calculate on the fly based on the expiration date and possibly other fields (even though its a pain)

IsActive as a field would probably work better if it wasn't a product of some other information like the expiration date, but was valid on its own, such as if a user manually set the status to "active" or "not active".

Answer 3

I think that can be managed with cronjob and django custom management command, is just an idea.