Recently I was just comparing 2 dates (one from a query and the other was now()) using the createODBCDate() and dateCompare() functions.
I was using the createODBCDate() function because I only wanted the ‘date’ part of a date object, not the ‘time’. More than likely I should have been using dateFormat(), but that’s another story 
I had the following:
<cfif dateCompare(createODBCDate(q.DateTimeCreated), createODBCDate(now())) EQ 0>
The problem was I kept getting -1 returned, meaning that ‘q.DateTimeCreated’ was less than ‘now()’. As ‘q.DateTimeCreated’ was technically created before ‘now()’ (same day but an earlier ‘time’) it is actually less than, but I only wanted to compare the date…not the time. When I dumped both date objects I got:
{d '2007-10-05'}
{d '2007-10-05'}
Looks the same to me…
I think that those date objects actually have the ‘time’ in them as well, they’re just not being displayed on cfdump or cfoutput. This seems strange especially considering there is a createODBCDateTime() function as well.
My fix was to do what I probably should have done in the first place; use dateFormat()
<cfif dateCompare(dateFormat(q.DateTimeCreated), dateFormat(now())) EQ 0>
That did the trick!
Now the only thing bothering me is whether the createODBCDate() function actually does return the ‘time’ as well…or was something else the culprit?
4 Comments
I think CreateODBCDate() does have a time index in it – otherwise (I’m guessing here) it wouldn’t be a valid ODBC Date/Time Object?
if you create a Date/Time field in Access, using Now() as the default, it’ll give you: 05/10/2007 09:54:43.
Presumably, CreateODBCDate returns:
05/10/2007 00:00:00 and CreateODBCDateTime will give you 05/10/2007 09:54:43.
That way they’re both valid for access (ODBC); I’d have a play with plain old CreateDate(), which I believe will just return the “date” part.
T
I think that’s what was happening Tom, the funny thing was why wasn’t I seeing the time part ‘00:00:00′ when I outputted or dumped the createODBCDate() object?
createDate() was another option for me, but was more work to pass in each date element (yyyymmdd) etc
We had a similar experience – passing a createodbcdate(now()) value to a function that increments the date based on the day of the week (using dateadd) resulted in a return of a date/time where time was NOT 00:00:00, but the actual time of day. Outputting the passed variable showed no time, while outputting the function result showed the time.
Yeah sounds a bit dodgy Dave, I guess it’s one of those things we just need to keep in mind.
Makes it harder though when the name of the function seems to go against its behaviour.