added cookbook example for localtime.

[catagits/Catalyst-Runtime.git] / lib / Catalyst / Manual / Cookbook.pod

diff --git a/lib/Catalyst/Manual/Cookbook.pod b/lib/Catalyst/Manual/Cookbook.pod
index 9f8b0eb..2bf2840 100644 (file)
--- a/lib/Catalyst/Manual/Cookbook.pod
+++ b/lib/Catalyst/Manual/Cookbook.pod
@@ -68,7 +68,7 @@ Just use Catalyst::Model::CDBI::CRUD as baseclass.
 Modify the $c->form() parameters to match your needs, and don't forget to copy
 the templates. ;)
 
-==head2 Serving static files and CSS as text/css
+=head2 Serving static files and CSS as text/css
 
 If you want to serve static content (like images, txt or CSS) via Catalyst,
 then all you need is the plugin Catalyst::Plugin::Static as well as a small
@@ -93,7 +93,7 @@ regex to set the MIME type for CSS to text/css.
         },
     );
 
-==head2 Uploads with Catalyst
+=head2 Uploads with Catalyst
 
 To implement uploads in Catalyst you need to have a HTML form similiar to
 this:
@@ -135,6 +135,34 @@ module:
 
     $CGI::Simple::POST_MAX = 1048576000;
 
+
+=head2 Easily working with datetime objects.
+
+If you store datetime data in your tables, you can easily expand this column to
+a L<Time::Piece> object which lets you call useful methods like ymd, mon and 
+datetime on it.
+
+In order to set it up, add something like the following to your CDBI Model Class,
+if you are storing dates as ISO timestamps:
+
+     __PACKAGE__->has_a(
+         mycolumn => 'Time::Piece',
+         inflate => sub { Time::Piece->strptime( shift, "%FT%H:%M:%S" ) },
+         deflate => 'datetime'
+     );
+
+or if you prefer to store dates in unix epoch time you can do something like this:
+
+     __PACKAGE__->has_a(
+         mycolumn => 'Time::Piece',
+         inflate => sub { Time::Piece->strptime( shift, "%s" ) },
+         deflate => 'epoch'
+     );
+
+If you want to use another format in the database, you can change the strptime call 
+to fit your format, and use strftime to return it with your custom format to the 
+database during deflate. See the L<Time::Piece> and L<Class::DBI> docs for more info.
+
 =head1 AUTHOR
 
 Sebastian Riedel, C<sri@oook.de>