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bitwalker / timex_ecto

An adapter for using Timex DateTimes with Ecto
MIT License
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Why use `Timex.Duration` instead of `Time`? #37

Closed martinmaillard closed 6 years ago

martinmaillard commented 7 years ago

I was wondering: what made you chose Timex.Duration for Timex.Ecto.Time fields instead of the Time type from standard lib?

bitwalker commented 7 years ago

Two reasons, first, it is the direct equivalent of the old Timex.Time type (just an Erlang timestamp), where Time is not (it can only be used to represent a 24 hour clock). The Timex.Time API was replaced with Timex.Duration, along with the new struct. However I have not yet added a complete Timex.Time API to work with the new Time type, mostly because there hasn't been much need beyond the one function pair to_12hour_clock/1 and to_24hour_clock/1. Because of this, I felt that getting a Timex.Duration type back would be far more useful, both for the above reasons, plus it allows non-pgsql databases to use time to represent intervals/durations as well.

In 3.0.3 I added Duration.to_time/1, Duration.to_time!/1, and Duration.from_time/1 for converting Duration back and forth between Time, so if you desire a Time struct, it is easy to obtain one from a Duration.

I'm open to changing this at some point, but I was mostly looking for a relatively one-to-one migration from the old timex to the new, without introducing too many changes.

martinmaillard commented 7 years ago

Ok that makes sense. Thanks for the answer!

I think I would prefer to have two different ecto types: Timex.Ecto.Time and Timex.Ecto.Duration. But I can work with one ;)

bitwalker commented 7 years ago

I can see the advantage in having a Time type as well, so it's on my TODO list :)