Typo Times Fix

After a bit of searching, I’ve found the problems with the odd times on this weblog. It’s a problem with ActiveRecord (part of Rails) and in particular, PostgreSQLAdaptor.

Basically, it computes a default value once, inside Ruby, and then caches it. Which is a bit odd, to say the least.

There are a number of open tickets related to this: 2873, 2877, 2257 and probably more. But looking at them, it seems that the problem will be fixed in Rails 1.1, which should be released “soon”.

Meanwhile, I’ll patch this particular instance of Typo to update the time on create. This is what I’ve used, and it seems to be working ok.

Index: app/models/article.rb
===================================================================
--- app/models/article.rb       (revision 727)
+++ app/models/article.rb       (working copy)
@@ -94,6 +94,9 @@
     self.extended_html = HtmlEngine.transform(extended, self.text_filter)
   end

+  # Work around PostgreSQL adaptor (http://dev.rubyonrails.org/ticket/2873)
+  before_create { |art| art.created_at = Time.now }
+
   def self.time_delta(year, month = nil, day = nil)
     from = Time.mktime(year, month || 1, day || 1)

Index: app/models/comment.rb
===================================================================
--- app/models/comment.rb       (revision 727)
+++ app/models/comment.rb       (working copy)
@@ -29,4 +29,7 @@
     self.body_html = HtmlEngine.transform(body, config["comment_text_filter"], [:filter_html])
   end

+  # Work around PostgreSQL adaptor (http://dev.rubyonrails.org/ticket/2873)
+  before_create { |art| art.created_at = Time.now }
+
 end