Question

With this code:

public static bool PlatypusIsAFornightOrLessOld(int PlatypusID) {
const int FORTNIGHT = 14;
const string sql = @"SELECT PLATYPUSBIRTHDATE
            FROM PLATYPI 
            WHERE PLATYPUSID = :PLATYPUSID";
DateTime dt;
try {
    using (var ocmd = new OracleCommand(sql, oc)) {
        ocmd.Parameters.Add("PLATYPUSID", PlatypusID);
        dt = Convert.ToDateTime(ocmd.ExecuteScalar());
    }
    return (DateTime.Today - dt) <= FORTNIGHT;
} catch (Exception e) {
. . .

I’m getting: “Operator ‘<=’ cannot be applied to operands of type ‘System.TimeSpan’ and ‘int'” on the “return” line.

Answer 1

Others have suggested going from the TimeSpan to the number of days. I would suggest it’s cleaner to represent FORTNIGHT as a TimeSpan too. Alternatively, even better yet: work out the deadline as a DateTime and avoid the subtraction entirely:

public static bool PlatypusIsAFornightOrLessOld(int platypusId) {
    DateTime oneFortnightAgo = DateTime.Today.AddDays(-14);

    ... SQL stuff ...

    return dt >= oneFortnightAgo;
}

Also, I hope that you haven’t really got catch(Exception e) in your real code. You should almost never catch Exception – and definitely not in the same method which is doing SQL operations.