Kris Wallsmith

Doctrine Timestamps and User Timezones

I recently added a “timezone” dropdown to the user preferences screen on a symfony application currently in development. This simple extension to the sfDoctrineRecord class makes it easy to present times from the database in the current user’s timezone.

abstract class myRecord extends sfDoctrineRecord
{
  protected function _get($fieldName, $load = true)
  {
    if ($value = parent::_get($fieldName, $load))
    {
      $column = $this->getTable()->getColumnDefinition($fieldName);
      if ($column && 'timestamp' == $column['type'])
      {
        $timezone = date_default_timezone_get();
        if (ProjectConfiguration::DEFAULT_TIMEZONE != $timezone)
        {
          // shift value to the current timezone
          date_default_timezone_set(ProjectConfiguration::DEFAULT_TIMEZONE);
          $time = strtotime($value);

          date_default_timezone_set($timezone);
          $value = date('Y-m-d H:i:s', $time);
        }
      }
    }

    return $value;
  }

  protected function _set($fieldName, $value, $load = true)
  {
    $column = $this->getTable()->getColumnDefinition($fieldName);
    if ($column && 'timestamp' == $column['type'] && $time = strtotime($value))
    {
      $timezone = date_default_timezone_get();
      if (ProjectConfiguration::DEFAULT_TIMEZONE != $timezone)
      {
        // shift value to the default timezone
        date_default_timezone_set(ProjectConfiguration::DEFAULT_TIMEZONE);
        $value = date('Y-m-d H:i:s', $time);

        date_default_timezone_set($timezone);
      }
    }

    return parent::_set($fieldName, $value, $load);
  }
}

To get sfDoctrinePlugin to use this class instead of the default, sfDoctrineRecord, add the following to your ProjectConfiguration.

// config/ProjectConfiguration.class.php
class ProjectConfiguration extends sfProjectConfiguration
{
  public function setup()
  {
    // ...

    sfConfig::set('doctrine_model_builder_options', array(
      'baseClassName' => 'myRecord',
    ));
  }

  // ...
}