Rails - May 2006 - migrations :timestamp becomes :datetime in mySql

For some reason whenever I try and create a timestamp column with 
migrations and mysql I get a datetime column instead. That''s kind of 
annoying because I want the column to update every time the row gets 
changed. Is this a bug, or is there something I can do about it? 
(Obviously I can manually change my mysql table, but that kind of 
defeats the point of migrations!)

In my migration file:

    create_table :some_table do |table|
         ...
         table.column :alter_date, :timestamp
         table.column :create_date, :datetime
    end

But in mysql I get:

CREATE TABLE `some_table` (
   ...
  `alter_date` datetime default NULL,
  `create_date` datetime default NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY  (`id`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 COLLATE=latin1_general_ci ;

-- 
Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.

> For some reason whenever I try and create a timestamp column with 
> migrations and mysql I get a datetime column instead. That''s kind
of
> annoying because I want the column to update every time the row gets 
> changed.
This is desired behaviour that allows for database neutrality (see 
http://torch.cs.dal.ca/~ssmith/?p=41). If you rename the column to 
updated_at rails will automagically do exactly what you want (see magic 
field names: http://wiki.rubyonrails.com/rails/pages/MagicFieldNames).

Cheers Tom.

-- 
Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.

I ran into this last week. It looks like a bug in mysql_adapter.rb.
Just changing line 106 to read:

  :timestamp => { :name => "timestamp" },

may be enough to fix it, but I couldn''t be sure. Have a go.

-Jonathan.

On 5/10/06, peter gd <peter@horsburgh.co.uk>
wrote:
> For some reason whenever I try and create a timestamp column with
> migrations and mysql I get a datetime column instead. That''s kind
of
> annoying because I want the column to update every time the row gets
> changed. Is this a bug, or is there something I can do about it?
> (Obviously I can manually change my mysql table, but that kind of
> defeats the point of migrations!)
>
> In my migration file:
>
>     create_table :some_table do |table|
>          ...
>          table.column :alter_date, :timestamp
>          table.column :create_date, :datetime
>     end
>
> But in mysql I get:
>
> CREATE TABLE `some_table` (
>    ...
>   `alter_date` datetime default NULL,
>   `create_date` datetime default NULL,
>   PRIMARY KEY  (`id`)
> ) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 COLLATE=latin1_general_ci ;
>

peter gd wrote:
> For some reason whenever I try and create a timestamp column with 
> migrations and mysql I get a datetime column instead. That''s kind
of
> annoying because I want the column to update every time the row gets 
> changed. Is this a bug, or is there something I can do about it? 
There was some reason for not supporting timestamp in migrations. This 
is documented somewhere, perhaps just in a blog post. A little Googling 
around ought to find it.

You can use the magic field names created_on/created_at and 
updated_on/updated_at to get what you want. These fields are 
automatically entered with the correct value whenever you create or 
update a record.

http://api.rubyonrails.com/classes/ActiveRecord/Timestamp.html

-- 

Ray