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estately / rets

A pure-ruby library for fetching data from RETS servers
https://github.com/estately/rets
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Rets Open House Datetimes #177

Closed summera closed 8 years ago

summera commented 8 years ago

@dougcole This is not directly related to the gem, but wanted to get your thoughts/experience on the matter.

Given that most Rets servers return open house datetimes relative to the listings location (no utc offset), and open house datetimes should be shown relative to the listings timezone (not the users's), how do you handle storage of datetimes? Do you convert to UTC before storing? Store a tz with the listing? Leave as is?

While it's best to store datetimes as UTC, open houses are an interesting problem.

Thanks!!

timdorr commented 8 years ago

ISO8601. Always use this for storage and serialization of your time data.

Grab the timezone from the metadata (unfortunately, this isn't easy) or store it with your definition for an MLS. Take your DateTime and openhouse_time.change(offset: mls_offset) to set the right time zone. Then use it like normal.

dougcole commented 8 years ago

Open house times are a pretty odd, most of the ones I've seen come as a string, something like 1pm-3pm which is (usually) in the local time. How we parse this depends on the mls and what they give us, but we end up storing all of them as strings, similar to the sample above. We keep the raw data from the rets server around too, in case we need to reprocess those strings, but the strings can be used directly on the website, not requiring any processing.

I'm not sure this is the best solution, but it's pragmatic and works well for us. This has the downside that we can't search our database for open houses by time, but in practice we've never really needed that and for the majority of mlses we do minimal processing to format the string.

If you do need to search by open house times, normalizing the times and storing in two columns (or a range column if you're in postgresql!) as @timdorr suggests is probably best.

summera commented 8 years ago

Thanks for the info! Much appreciated :smile: . We have settled on a similar approach... storing as is.

If, as you said, there is no need to search by time or show an open house time in a different timezone, then might as well save yourself the complexity and store as is.

@timdorr Unfortunately, you can't rely on an mls offset all the time because the mls may span multiple timezones and, as I recently noticed, the tz offset that an mls may advertise does not correct for DST.