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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-13T12:39:06+00:00

I have a users hours worked stored in SQLite as HH:MM in my Android

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I have a users “hours worked” stored in SQLite as HH:MM in my Android application. I do not want to change the way this data is stored, if possible. That would be a nightmare. I want them to be able to search entries in which their time is =,<, or > another timestamp.

For example, using my app they can make a WHERE clause like the following: time(Hours) > time('5:51') where Hours is the column name. However, I can’t seem to get any results, even if I know there’s a matching row.

Am I doing something wrong? I don’t get any exceptions, just no results.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    time will not accept durations unless they are coincidentally also valid times. So even though someone can work 40 hours:

    SELECT (time('40:00') IS NULL);

    gives 1 (showing it’s an error).

    SELECT (time('11:00') IS NULL);

    is 0. But presumably both need to work.

    Luckily, if you stick to two-digit hours and two-digit minutes, you can compare them as ordinary strings.

    SELECT '84:13' > '29:03';
1

SELECT '05:12' > '43:58';
0

    EDIT: A better solution might be to simply store the number of minutes as an INTEGER (one of the SQLite base types). Yes, you need to do a one-time upgrade conversion, but I think it’s a better choice.

    You have complete precision, you can easily multiply (e.g. by an hourly rate), and it’s a simple modulus if you want to display as HH:MM in some report.

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