Strange behavior with dates

Question

I would like to store the input of the calendar-field in my JTable::store.

To do so I'm doing this:

Form-declaration:

    <field name="creationdate"
           type="calendar"
           default="NOW"
           label="COM_BESTIA_FIELDS_CREDITCREATIONDATE_LABEL"
           description="COM_BESTIA_FIELDS_CREDITCREATIONDATE_DESC"
           format="%d.%m.%Y %H:%M"
           filter="user_utc"/>

Store-Method in JTable:

    if ( !empty( $input[ 'creationdate' ] ) && !( $input[ 'creationdate' ] == "0000-00-00 00:00:00" ) )    // Prepare date to be saved in database
    {
        // Set this to a format the sql-table is able to save
        $date               = JFactory::getDate($input[ 'creationdate' ]);
        $this->creationdate = $date->toSql();
    }
    else
    {
        throw new Exception(JText::_('COM_BESTIA_ERROR_INCORRECTDATES'));
    }

This works fine. If I var_dump the output doing

    var_dump(JFactory::getDate($input[ 'creationdate' ])->toSql());
    var_dump(JFactory::getDate($this->creationdate)->toSql());

I'm getting this result:

string(19) "2016-05-13 09:30:00" string(19) "2016-05-13 09:30:00"

This is correct.

But in another form I'm getting this result for:

XML:

var_dump:

    var_dump(JFactory::getDate($input[ 'creationdate' ])->toSql());
    var_dump(JFactory::getDate($this->creationdate)->toSql());

Result:

string(16) "13.05.2016 09:41" string(19) "2016-05-13 07:41:00"

Any idea why I'm getting different values?

Edit: The reason why I'm using the input sometimes instead of $this->creationdate is that I'm using a CLI script to create elements. And until now I was not able to get the values to database if I use $this->creationdate and not the input.

Answer 1

I looked at the code for this. JDate::dateformat is public, which means ANY code can modify the value. I would start doing a grep/search through my source tree (and any plugins/modules/libraries) to look for assignments to it.

Looking at the Time difference issue, what I think is that JFactory() is constructing the date two different ways. The first, with the value of $input['creationdate'] is passing in a character string. The second is passing a numeric value. If you look at the constructor for JDate(), if the date argument is a numeric, it converts the timestamp to UTC.

What you should also do is dump the value for date->getTimezone() to examine them.