Question

I’ve been stuck on this for two days and have gotten no where. I tend to think future and the future problems that will come around. My server’s time is set to UTC and linux box is fully updated with the timezones as well as the data is in my database.

I’ll explain my system for the best answer.

This site sells “items” but can only sell during open and closed times. The stores can have split hours: ie: open from 8am-12pm 1pm-8pm… etc.

So my hours table looks like:

id (1) | store_id (1) | opens (08:00) | closes (21:00)

Above has the sample data next to the column name. Basically store id#1 may be in Los Angeles (US/Pacific) or it may be in New York City (US/Eastern).

What is the best way to ensure that I don’t miss an hour of downtime so I can disalow users to order from these stores during their off hours. If I’m off of the times one hour, that’s one hour no one can order when they are really open and an hour users will order when they are really closed.. visa versa depending on time changes.

Has anyone dealt with this? And if so, how did you do it?

What is the best way I can go to solve this issue. I’ve been dealing with it and it’s eating my brain for the past 48 hours.

Please help! 🙂

Answer 1

It’s actually super easy to achieve in Postgres and MySQL. All you have to do is store the timezone in the user side, set server TZ to UTC, then convert between the two.

EX:

SELECT 
    CASE WHEN (
        (CAST((CURRENT_TIMESTAMP at time zone s.timezone) as time) BETWEEN h.opens AND h.closes) AND 
        h.day = extract(dow from CURRENT_TIMESTAMP at time zone s.timezone)) THEN 0 ELSE 1 END
    ) as closed 
FROM store s 
LEFT JOIN store_hours r ON s.id = r.store_id 
HERE h.day = extract(dow from CURRENT_TIMESTAMP at time zone s.timezone)

It’s something like that. I had to do typecasting that way because I was limited for using Doctrine 1.2.

Works like a charm even with DST changes.