Odoo 11 Development Essentials - Third Edition

Working with time and dates

For historical reasons, ORM recordsets handle date and datetime values using their strings representations, instead of actual Python Date and Datetime objects:

• odoo.tools.DEFAULT_SERVER_DATE_FORMAT
• odoo.tools.DEFAULT_SERVER_DATETIME_FORMAT

They map to %Y-%m-%d and %Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S respectively. In the database, they are stored in date fields, but datetimes are stored without time zone, in UTC time.

To help handle dates, fields.Date and fields.Datetime provide a few functions, for example:

>>> from odoo import fields
>>> fields.Datetime.now()
'2017-11-21 23:11:55'
>>> fields.Datetime.from_string('2017-11-21 23:11:55')
    datetime.datetime(2017, 11, 21, 23, 11, 55)

Dates and times are handled and stored by the server ...