Question

I’m using OAuth to authenticate my app to access a user’s facebook details using OAuth. Recently, I migrated the database to use PostgreSQL, and now am having trouble storing the token information when returned from Facebook.

The exact error is:

PG::Error: ERROR:  invalid input syntax for type timestamp: "1350424800"
: INSERT INTO "authentications" ("created_at", "oauth_expires_at", "oauth_token", "provider", "uid", "updated_at", "user_id") VALUES ($1, $2, $3, $4, $5, $6, $7) RETURNING "id"

Strangely, this wasn’t the case with SQLite, so it’s clearly something to do with the format in which Facebook returns the expiry date (“1350424800”). Any thoughts on how I should parse this to make it work?

I’m not doing anything clever with the way it’s created at present, simply:

def self.create_with_omniauth(auth)
    create(uid: auth['uid'], provider: auth['provider'], oauth_token: auth['credentials'].token, oauth_expires_at: auth['credentials'].expires_at)
end

Any help greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

PG::Error: ERROR: invalid input syntax for type timestamp: “1350424800”

You have a nummeric Unix Timestamp value here – whereas the PostgreSQL data type timestamp obviously has to be given in another format.

And looking here http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/datatype-datetime.html#DATATYPE-DATETIME-DATE-TABLE, you can see some of the accepted formats, but a nummeric Unix Timestamp does not appear to be listed there.

So you’ll have to convert/format the value into one of the accepted formats first; there might be a function designed to do this in PostgreSQL … (if not, Google should help).