Question

I’m using couchdb as downloaded from http://couch.io/get on Mac OS X 10.6, and it does not handle Dates properly. For example, the following view (map only) gives emits {} for date objects:

function(doc) {
    emit(new Date(), null);
}

The same thing holds for variations on the date: Date("2000-10-10"), Date("2000/10/10"), and Date("10/10/2000") all produce {}.

My guess is that this has to do with my javascript version, since Dates work as I’d expect on my Linux machine. Still, when I run js from the command line, it has a completely different behavior for Dates. If this is a version issue, then how can I tell what version of javascript CouchDB is running, how can I change that, and what version should I be running?

Answer 1

My guess is that for some reason the date’s toString() doesn’t get called, so it is getting {} as a generic representation of a javascript object.

Not sure of the result you were expecting, but you could use one of these:

emit( (new Date()).toString(), null ); // Tue Jan 04 2011 13:24:48 GMT-0600 (CST)

emit( (new Date()).getTime(), null ); // 1294169100617