Comments on: Working with dates in Flex AIR and SQLite

By: Dates in Flex, AIR, SQLITE, And ActionScript « Charlie's Flex Blog

Dates in Flex, AIR, SQLITE, And ActionScript « Charlie's Flex Blog — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 21:01:06 +0000

[...] you can safely store Dates as TEXT or DATE types in SQLITE, but if you store it as DATE, then AIR will convert the date value to the DOUBLE format (julian date), which for most humans is not readable as a [...]

By: Jason

Jason — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 17:04:31 +0000

Hey Tim, try running you query directly using something like SQL Query Manager first. If it runs fine there, then you can look further into AIR. It sounds like you may just have an error in your SQL statement, though.

By: Tim

Tim — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 23:20:41 +0000

I am getting the error on a SELECT query and none of the tables has any kind of date column. The datatypes are:

int
varchar(255)
varchar(1)
bit
varchar(50)
varchar(8)

By: Jason

Jason — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 16:58:15 +0000

Hey Hermanshu, I’m not as familiar with using JavaScript in AIR apps. If you got an object back, you might inspect it to see if it’s some type of date structure, in which case you don’t need to do any of manipulation in your query.

By: Hemanshu Bhojak

Hemanshu Bhojak — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 06:29:21 +0000

I am trying to insert a date in the db from javascript using parameters. The date inserts fine, but when I retrieve the data the date is returned as an object. I also tried formatting the date using the STRFTIME, but that returns null.

By: Jason

Jason — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 18:56:43 +0000

Hey Alex, it looks like you do have a julian date there, did you make sure your sqlite column type/affinity is “date” or “datetime” ? even though those column types are not technically recognized by sqlite, AIR does internally rely on them.

By: Alex Araujo

Alex Araujo — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 22:05:23 +0000

Today, I’m using this technique but today my application just breaked and I don’t know what to do to resolve the following issue:

Type Coercion failed: cannot convert 2454942.2072685184 to Date

Any tips? Thanks!

By: Norm

Norm — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 22:43:34 +0000

Just wanted to say thanks for the post. Really helped save some time!

By: Jason

Jason — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 18:30:47 +0000

Thanks for stopping by Paul. I should update this post a bit because I’ve since learned quite a lot more about list item renderers.

I’ve found that you can actually make the DateField more reliable in a DataGrid by extending the DateField class and overriding the “data” getter/setter. The problem happens in DateField.data setter where it detects “_listData is DataGridListData” and then craps out with a Type Coercion. If you extend DateField then you can override data and parse/cast the value however you like.

Your link definitely cleared up some suspicions I had about the column affinity. It also kinda blew my mind that you guys built in XML and Object column types, which has my curiosity.

It’s interesting how SQLite is documented so that it just looks for keywords. ie varchar(25) or varchar(10) both contain “char” so SQLite treats it as text. [http://www.sqlite.org/datatype3.html] So, perhaps it is the same with “date” meaning that “datetime” and “date” would both trigger to AIR that the column affinity is a date?

Thanks again.

By: Paul Robertson

Paul Robertson — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 18:26:19 +0000

I’ve used ActionScript Date objects directly, without any problems either inserting or retrieving the data.

I think the difference is that I create the column with a declared data type “Date” (or “DATE”) rather than “DATETIME”. If you use “Date” then AIR knows you’re going to be using ActionScript Date objects, and it does all the conversion automatically for you.

I assume the reason you’re using DATETIME is because you have an existing SQLite database or you’re reusing code from another app… If not, I’d suggest just using Date rather than DATETIME.

This information is in the documentation — although perhaps a bit buried:

http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/3/langref/localDatabaseSQLSupport.html#columnAffinity

Paul Robertson
Adobe AIR team
(I’m the person who wrote the documentation for the SQLite feature)