From: Alex LeDonne <aledonne.listmail@...>
Date: 2007-03-27T02:50:17+09:00
Subject: Re: find_by_sql and date_format

On 3/25/07, felix sheng <felix@deasil.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I'm beginning my first project in Ruby (and Rails) and running into
> an issue. I need to pull some data out of mysql using the date_format
> command but ActiveRecord is not appreciating my sql. I'm doing
> something like:
>
>         Table.find_by_sql( [ 'select column1, date_format("%Y%m%d", column2)
> as column2 from table where column1 = ?', some_data ] );
>
> More or less it looks like that. The key problem seems to be the
> date_format has %'s in it and it gives me:
>
>         malformed format string - %Y
>
> And the trace:
>
>         /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-1.15.3/lib/
> active_record/base.rb:1418:in `%'
>         /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-1.15.3/lib/
> active_record/base.rb:1418:in `sanitize_sql_array'
>         /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-1.15.3/lib/
> active_record/base.rb:1387:in `sanitize_sql'
>         /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-1.15.3/lib/
> active_record/base.rb:427:in `find_by_sql'
>
> Is there any way to handle this situation? I also tried using the raw
> connection, but that didn't seem to take bind variables which I found
> unsatisfying, so didn't pursue it too closely.
>
> Any help/pointers are greatly appreciated.
>
> felix
>

Felix,

According to http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/4.1/en/date-and-time-functions.html
, the function should be called as:

DATE_FORMAT(date,format)

That is, the format is the SECOND argument.

-A