I’ve been working on some code that gets a list of “old” orders based on the created_at value for an order. Of course, I wrote a test using a fixture that gets the list of old orders and makes assertions about it. I was not as rigorous as I should have been and simply checked to make sure the correct count of orders was returned and went along my merry way.
Today the test broke when I made some other changes. During my investigation, I printed out the contents of the orders and discovered the created_at and updated_at values were being set to all zeros. OK, that would explain why they’re considered “old” if they’re from “the beginning of time.” But I still wanted to be able to put values in for created_at that would cause an order to be too new to be included in the query. So, I figured I’d do something like this:
created_at: <%= Time.now %>
No workie; still zeros. Well, thanks to this blog entry, I was able to get it right:
created_at: <%= Time.now.to_s(:db) %>