Shift8 Creative Graphic Design and Website Development

So if you're using Lithium and MongoDB you can set in your model the $_schema property which will allow you to set data types for your fields. So things may look like this: 

protected $_schema = array(
  '_id' => array('type' => 'id'),
  'created' => array('type' => 'date')
);

With that, the "created" field will be of type "date" which will be a MongoDB date object. This date object isn't going to display properly when you got to print it back out in your view templates. You'll end up with some weird number value. The timestamp is actually within this date object that's returned under the "sec" key. So it would be $document->created->sec in your view template (assuming $document was your result from the database).

How about formatting to a pretty date? If you're coming from CakePHP or some other frameworks you may be spoiled and have a time or date helper. Lithium is pretty lean and leaves that as one of your responsibilities. Fortunately, alkemann has created some helpers that mimic some from CakePHP for Lithium. These include a Time helper. So in your view template, you can use:

echo $this->time->to('nice', $document->created->sec); 

That will output something more readable like, "Fri, Jan 14th 2011, 02:29" instead now. Don't have or want those helpers? You may be crazy, but you can also use:

echo date('Y-M-d h:i:s', $document->created->sec); 

However, I would definitely give those AL13 helpers a look, they are pretty nice. The important thing to remember here though is that when using MongoDB date objects, your timestamp is under this "sec" key. Of course, you can always store timestamp integers or string values, but then you're really crazy.