When working with database tables, it is very common to have a column that holds the time that the record was added or last modified. If you have an e-commerce website with an orders table, you want to store the date and time the order was made; if you run a blog, you want to know when someone left a comment; and so on.

As with anything that is a common task performed by many developers, it makes a good candidate for abstracting to the framework level. So that's what we did.

Columns Used for Timestamps

If you have either of the following columns in your database table, Wheels will see them and treat them a little differently than others.

createdAt

Wheels will use a createdAt column automatically to store the current date and time when an INSERT operation is made (which could happen through a save() or create() operation, for example).

updatedAt

If Wheels sees an updatedAt column, it will use it to store the current date and time automatically when an UPDATE operation is made (which could happen through a save() or update() operation, for example).

Data Type of Columns

If you add any of these columns to your table, make sure they can accept date/time values (like datetime or timestamp, for example) and that they can be set to null.