OCDEP 101: Standardize Usage of Dates & Times¶
- Created:
2017-05-26
- Author:
James Turk
- Status:
Accepted
Overview¶
There are currently three ways we handle dates & times throughout Open Civic Data. This proposal aims to evaluate them and make several changes that will increase consistency & serve as guidance for future decisions.
Rationale¶
The current situation:
- “Fuzzy Date Field”
This is implemented as a char field allowing up to 10 characters. Dates are expected to conform to the YYYY[-MM[-DD]] format.
This comes from Popolo, and allows dates to be specified with varying degrees of accuracy depending on what is known. (e.g. sometimes we only know a person’s birth year, or the month something came into being)
The field is used in the following places:
BillAbstract.date
BillAction.date
BillDocument.date
BillVersion.date
EventDocument.date
EventMedia.date (via EventMediaBase)
EventAgendaMedia.date (via EventMediaBase)
LegislativeSession.{start_date,end_date}
Membership.{start_date,end_date}
Organization.{founding_date,dissolution_date}
OrganizationName.{start_date,end_date} (via OtherNameBase)
Person.{birth_date,death_date}
PersonName.{start_date,end_date} (via OtherNameBase)
Post.{start_date,end_date}
- “Fuzzy Datetime Field”
For VoteEvents sometimes the time is important too, so we extended the above field to 19 characters, allowing an additional inclusion of time in HH:MM:SS.
This field is used only in
VoteEvent.{start_date,end_date}
Finally, we sometimes use native DateTime fields.
Notably this is used for every model’s created_at/updated_at timestamp.
It is also used for
Event.{start_time,end_time}
This has the advantage of being timezone-aware.
Issues with current approach¶
For the most part this is OK, and we’re fairly consistent. Most uses of fuzzy date align with the goals, but in a few cases it seems like we’ve made some mistakes:
VoteEvent and Event have very similar start/end times but use different and incompatible representations. VoteEvent’s special case of fuzzy time can have a time but lacks a timezone, while Event’s fields are named start_time/end_time and use a DateTime object, the only place one is used (also requiring more precision than we’re guaranteed to have).
And two other issues:
The extended format is almost ISO8601 datetime, but uses a space instead of a ‘T’ as the separator of date & time.
We need the ability to set times on BillAction.date, just like VoteEvent. We are frequently forced to truncate times.
Implementation¶
We’d make the following changes:
To address #1 and #2: add timezone to “fuzzy datetime” and bring the full format in line w/ ISO8601, changing the format from:
YYYY[-MM][-DD][ HH:MM:SS]
to
^
[0-9]{4}
(
(-[0-9]{2}){0,2} |
(-[0-9]{2}){2} T [0-9]{2}(:[0-9]{2}){0,2} (Z | [+-] [0-9]{2}(:[0-9]{2})?)
)?
$
Also considered:
Convert it to a full datetime, but this would require a time on every vote. We might not have one.
Define that time is always stored in UTC, but this would be more error prone than being explicit.
To further address #1, rename Event.start_time,end_time to start_date,end_date to match Event and have it adopt the fuzzy datetime. This was chosen instead of renaming VoteEvent’s fields to remain consistent w/ Popolo & other standards. This also makes the separate timezone field on event redundant and confusing, so it would be removed.
Also considered:
Leaving this be, but I think we should take this opportunity to fix as many time related issues as we can.
To address #3, extend BillAction.date to allow “fuzzy datetimes”.
Also considered:
It could also become a full datetime (see #1), but would mostly have to fake the time.
Naming the field ‘time’ was initially recommended, but since we aren’t changing other fields that has been withdrawn.
Copyright¶
This document has been placed in the public domain per the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal license (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/deed).