[PATCH] Missing methods "end_of_..." in Time and Date

Methods and test

New methods(end_of_week, end_of_quarter, end_of_year), alias and tests.

Cleaned/rebased patch also fixed the :mday -> :day making test pass again

I was looking at the implementation of all the end_of_* methods and I saw that they all set the hours, minutes and seconds to 0. Wouldn't it make more sense if they were all :hour => 23, :min => 59, :sec => 59, :usec => 999?

What do you think Geoff?

Replying to bitsweat:

What do you think Geoff?

These new methods are consistent with the pattern set by end_of_month, which returns the beginning of the day of the last day of the month:

>> Time.local(2007,11, 17).end_of_month
=> Fri Nov 30 00:00:00 -0600 2007

However, to manfred's point, this doesn't seem quite right -- given that we're modifying a Time object, not a Date object, this should return a value corresponding to the end of the last day of the month, not the beginning of that day.

This results in counterintuitive behavior -- noon on Nov 29 is before the end of the month, but noon on Nov 30 is after:

>> Time.local(2007,11,29,12) < Time.local(2007,11,17).end_of_month
=> true
>> Time.local(2007,11,30,12) < Time.local(2007,11,17).end_of_month
=> false

To correct this, I think we should change end_of_month to return a Time representing the last second of the month. After this change, anyone who wanted the beginning of this day instead of the end could always get that with: time_obj.end_of_month.beginning_of_day.

In regards to manfred's suggestion to set usec to 999 for all end_of methods: this is technically correct, given the resolution of the Time class; however, in the domain of web apps, we generally don't care about storing and presenting time values with milliseconds, and to_s(:db) chops them off anyway. Also, usec values don't appear in Time #inspect representations, which makes debugging more difficult.

Given these reasons, I suggest that we stay with ActiveSupport's current behavior, which assumes a seconds resolution for all beginning_of and end_of methods (see Time#change, which sets usec to 0 when hour, min, or sec values are supplied.)

Moving forward, I suggest:

1. end_of_month's implementation should be changed to return a Time representing the last second of the month
2. the new end_of week/quarter/year methods should be updated to return the last second of the week, quarter and year
3. the :sunday alias for end_of_week should be removed, since it would no longer be appropriate
4. add end_of week/quarter/year methods to Date calculations, to preserve duck-typing compatibility with DateTime

Patch to fix Time and DateTime #end_of_month: #10200

I have a plugin of most of these methods, some word for word (online for a year), if the implementations are meant to remain outside of rails, for anyone to use. ;)

ah, the link: http://svn.robertrevans.com/plugins/calc_extension/lib/calc_extension.rb

end_of_XX methods updated with Geoff suggestions

Replying to gbuesing:

Moving forward, I suggest: 1. end_of_month's implementation should be changed to return a Time representing the last second of the month 2. the new end_of week/quarter/year methods should be updated to return the last second of the week, quarter and year 3. the :sunday alias for end_of_week should be removed, since it would no longer be appropriate 4. add end_of week/quarter/year methods to Date calculations, to preserve duck-typing compatibility with DateTime

Done! The new patch updates the implmentations of the methods and include them both in Time and Date classes.

(In [8934]) Adding Time#end_of_day, _quarter, _week, and _year. Closes #9312.