django - make datetimefield accept unix timestamp

Question

i\'d like to make the DateTimefield of models accept unix timestamp (in seconds) values.

I found this but the acepted solution doesn\'t work?
unixtimestamp inp

Answer 1

Using UNIX timestamp as values for DateTimeField should probably come with Django by default. Django’s introspection is really powerful but makes things less obvious than desirable, especially in the context of Python code.

You can achieve it by subclassing DateTimeField and overriding the pre_save method.

from django.db import models
from datetime import datetime

from django.db.models.fields import DateTimeField

class UCDateTimeField(DateTimeField):

    def pre_save(self, model_instance, add):
        if self.auto_now or (self.auto_now_add and add):
            value = datetime.datetime.now()
            setattr(model_instance, self.attname, value)
            return value
        else:
            value = getattr(model_instance, self.attname)
            if not isinstance(value, datetime):
                # assume that the value is a timestamp if it is not a datetime
                value = datetime.fromtimestamp(int(value))
                # an exception might be better than an assumption
                setattr(model_instance, self.attname, value)
            return super(UCDateTimeField, self).pre_save(model_instance, add)


class Event(models.Model):
    date = UCDateTimeField()

Answer 2

The pip package django-unixdatetimefield provides a UnixDateTimeField field that you can use for this out of the box (https://pypi.python.org/pypi/django-unixdatetimefield/).

Example model:

from django_unixdatetimefield import UnixDateTimeField

class MyModel(models.Model):
    created_at = UnixDateTimeField()

Python ORM query:

>>> m = MyModel()
>>> m.created_at = datetime.datetime(2015, 2, 21, 19, 38, 32, 209148)
>>> m.save()

Database:

sqlite> select created_at from mymodel;
1426967129

Here's the source code if interested - https://github.com/Niklas9/django-unixdatetimefield.

Disclaimer: I'm the author of this pip package.