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Timestampable Behavior

The timestampable behavior lets you keep track of the date of creation and last update of your model objects.

Basic usage

Section titled “Basic usage”

In schema.xml, use the <behavior> tag to add the timestampable behavior to a table:

<table name="book">
  <column name="id" required="true" primaryKey="true" autoIncrement="true" type="integer" />
  <column name="title" type="varchar" required="true" primaryString="true" />
  <behavior name="timestampable" />
</table>

Rebuild your model, run the table creation SQL again, and you’re ready to go. The model now has two new columns, created_at and updated_at, that store a timestamp automatically updated on save:

$b = new Book();
$b->setTitle('War And Peace');
$b->save();
echo $b->getCreatedAt('Y-m-d H:i:s'); // 2009-10-02 18:14:23
echo $b->getUpdatedAt('Y-m-d H:i:s'); // 2009-10-02 18:14:23
$b->setTitle('Anna Karenina');
$b->save();
echo $b->getCreatedAt('Y-m-d H:i:s'); // 2009-10-02 18:14:23
echo $b->getUpdatedAt('Y-m-d H:i:s'); // 2009-10-02 18:14:25

The object query also has specific methods to retrieve recent objects and order them by their update date:

$books = BookQuery::create()
    ->recentlyUpdated()  // adds a minimum value for the update date
    ->lastUpdatedFirst() // orders the results by descending update date
    ->find();

You can use any of the following methods on the object query:

// limits the query to recent objects
ModelCriteria recentlyCreated($nbDays = 7)
ModelCriteria recentlyUpdated($nbDays = 7)
// orders the results
ModelCriteria lastCreatedFirst()  // order by creation date desc
ModelCriteria firstCreatedFirst() // order by creation date asc
ModelCriteria lastUpdatedFirst()  // order by update date desc
ModelCriteria firstUpdatedFirst() // order by update date asc

Parameters

Section titled “Parameters”

You can change the name of the columns added by the behavior with the create_column and update_column parameters:

<table name="book">
  <column name="id" required="true" primaryKey="true" autoIncrement="true" type="integer" />
  <column name="title" type="varchar" required="true" primaryString="true" />
  <column name="my_create_date" type="timestamp" />
  <column name="my_update_date" type="timestamp" />
  <behavior name="timestampable">
    <parameter name="create_column" value="my_create_date" />
    <parameter name="update_column" value="my_update_date" />
  </behavior>
</table>
$b = new Book();
$b->setTitle('War And Peace');
$b->save();
echo $b->getMyCreateDate('Y-m-d H:i:s'); // 2009-10-02 18:14:23
echo $b->getMyUpdateDate('Y-m-d H:i:s'); // 2009-10-02 18:14:23
$b->setTitle('Anna Karenina');
$b->save();
echo $b->getMyCreateDate('Y-m-d H:i:s'); // 2009-10-02 18:14:23
echo $b->getMyUpdateDate('Y-m-d H:i:s'); // 2009-10-02 18:14:25