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I have a bunch of input values in this format:

2014-05-14 17:42:18

And I would like to store them in a field in QGIS. I am using the Python API for GDAL/OGR. I notice that QGIS supports a field type "QDate", but it seems that it can only handle dates with no time, as such:

2014-05-14

I'm just wondering if there is a way to get around this or am I stuck storing the timestamp as a string?

luca76
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wfgeo
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  • When you say you to store datetime in field. It 's in a field of what ? A layer? Postgis? shape? ... Could you please be more precise. And wich version of Qgis? 1.8 or 2.x – Controlix Jan 13 '16 at 12:16

1 Answers1

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I guess the python OGR API has a way to define a datetime field and store data in it (its defined in the OFRFieldType enum. You have to use the OFTDateTime (or OFTDate or OFTTime) type defined by OGR.

So you can do something like :

date_field = ogr.FieldDefn("date", ogr.OFTDateTime)
your_layer.CreateField(date_field)

then you can set the value for a feature by passing your date as a string:

feature = ogr.Feature(your_layer.GetLayerDefn())
feature.SetField("date", "2014-05-14 17:42:18")

The result may depend on your output data structure (if it defines/supports a date time type) and on the desktop GIS software you are using to display them.

EDIT : But I tested to write a shapefile like this, then open it in QGIS; the date field was properly recognized as a QDate field, and as you say the time is not showing so I looked in the .dbf file and the time part doesn't seems to have been written.

Glorfindel
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mgc
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