TryGhost / TryGhost/NQL

Ensure that date & relative date comparisons work in a consistent way across JSON, SQLite and MySQL

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enhancement
Dominant language
JavaScript
Stars
7
Forks
7
Avg merge
9h 4m
Merged PRs (30d)
22

Description

NQL date handling is in an unmanageable state.

We have to manage across the following variables:

  • The format you use to insert into a DB (e.g. in fixtures) is different to what DBs return
  • The formats you can use to do a comparison like > or < is not consistent between SQLite and MySQL
  • The formats we return from the DB, and from our API endpoints can all be different
  • JSON comparisons seem to work in some cases and not others, but really we should be using ISODate
  • The mai use cases for dates are:
  1. get helpers, where the real use case looks like this:
    {{#get "posts" filter="published_at:<='{{published_at}}'+id:-{{id}}" limit="3"}}
    this means it depends what comes out of the API as to what goes back in...
    ref: https://ghost.org/docs/themes/helpers/get/#filter
  2. Prev & Next helpers which are builtins that do essentially the same thing, but they enforce that the right format
    ref: https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost/blob/1cc38733ba6df8b8340420cff8fc7b643704c6ae/core/frontend/helpers/prev_post.js#L21
  3. relative date queries like last_seen_at>now-1d
    ref: https://github.com/TryGhost/NQL/issues/26

We need to make sure that dates work consistently in these 3 cases.

Contributor guide

No contributing guide indexed for this repository

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by comparing the date handling in JSON, SQLite and MySQL, then read core/frontend/helpers/prev_post.js and the linked NQL issue #26. Trace the get helper, Prev and Next helpers, and relative-date queries such as last_seen_at>now-1d. Done means these three use cases compare dates consistently across the supported database formats and API values.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
javascript, mysql, sqlite
Domain
backend-api-design, databases
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
25/100

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