This is my SQLStatement:
public var insertClient:String = “INSERT INTO clients (…status, dateCreated, dateModified, …) VALUES (… :status, time(‘NOW’), time(‘NOW’), ….)”;

This stores dates on my database as floats. However, when I use the same statement through an sqlite administrator or command line dates seem to be stored in human readable format (yyyy – mm – dd). I want to store dates on my database, through actionscript code, in yyyy – mm – dd format. do you know if this is possible or not?

Above is a section I wrote “Formatting a Julian date manually in SQL so you can read it” that will show you how you can visually look at dates in the database through a query browser.

Keep in mind this is not how you want to format your SQL statements in your app – this is just for visually inspecting the database.

actually wrong?

I reached the desired effect with:
SELECT time(dateCreated) as dateCreated from clients;

However, this is not the problem that brought me here. Rather, I am having difficulties with storing dates on my sqlite table through actionscript.

My data type for my date column on my table is DATE, and I am referencing an actionscript Date object when executing my INSERT statement, but the values for my date (dateCreated) column keep appearing as numbers, not formated as desired: yyyy, mm, dd, hh:mm:ss!

Since I noticed Paul’s comment to be two and a half years old, and since his advice does not seem to be working in my case, I was wondering if you know what could be the issue… perhaps something changed since march 2009?

SELECT STRFTIME(‘%J’,my_column) as my_column from my_table

then AIR will be able to cast the value of my_column as a date

I already designed my Sqllite db a little differently, storing the DATE as an integer which I get by converting an AS3 Date object using the getTime() method. This returns the number of milliseconds since 1/1/1970. It’s pretty simple to convert back and forth from dates to integers using the getTime() and setTime() functions and so I haven’t run into any reasons not to do store dates this way.

I would appreciate any comments you may have on this method, especially if you see something which could cause a problem for me in the future. For instance, this method would not store the time zone information. But AS3 always adds the local TZ to any new Date object so I didn’t see that as an issue. Anything you see that I’m missing?

Thanks!

Is there a trick to updating a DATE column?
I am passing an AS3 Date obj in the SQLite statement but is not working.

The interesting thing for me was that queries like this:

SELECT MIN(someDateTime) AS d FROM SomeTable

would work if I then wrapped the results in a new Date(r['d']). The value in ‘d’ was the literal epoch time in miliseconds.

What didn’t work was just querying the date directly. It always came back as null. What I figured out (thanks to your post) is that AS was trying to coerce the date in the simple query into a date and failing. In the MIN/MAX (and I assume any other aggregate method) AS couldn’t tell the type so it just guessed number…

For me, because the data I’m working with only has second level precision to start with, I just modified my queries thusly:

SELECT … DATETIME(someDateTime/1000, ‘unixepoch’) ….

In my case java stores all dates in UTC, so if you want this to be local, you could add ‘local’ right after ‘unixepoch’ and sqlite would handle the timezone conversion.

The /1000 is because sqlite only understands unix epoch in seconds. I suppose I could also have just changed the column type to be int or something else NOT datetime and my new Date(…) trick from MIN/MAX would have worked. Still, a little insane.

int
varchar(255)
varchar(1)
bit
varchar(50)
varchar(8)