I am having a hard time to figure out how to deal with the following problem:
Our company is publishing posts to social media platforms. Those posts are stored within the database once they where successfully postet.
We want to provide a dashboard showing an overview of how many posts the user published over a time period grouped by minutes, hours and days.
I want to display the results as a time series graph.
This would work fine, but it gets very tricky once I have to support multiple time zones when I do aggregation/grouping by days. (apparently posts around midnight belong to different days depending on which time zone you are)
My current solution builds the postgres query using rails ActiveRecord. The problem I am facing is that I am struggling to deal with the timezone conversions... Also I am not particular good at postgres... The current implementation essentially looks like this (I removed irrelevant code):
Publication.select(
%{date_trunc('#{interval}',
published_at::timestamptz at time zone interval '#{time_zone_offset}')::timestamptz as time,
count(published_at)})
.where(%(published_at BETWEEN
timestamptz '#{start_date}' AND
timestamptz '#{end_date}'))
.group("1")
.order('time').limit(LIMIT)
For example:
I have one publication at 2016-03-15 10:19:24.219258 (Thats how it is stored inside the database therefore UTC time) I create the following query:
SELECT date_trunc('hour',
published_at::timestamptz at time zone interval '+01:00')::timestamptz as time,
count(published_at) FROM "publications" WHERE (published_at BETWEEN
timestamptz '2016-03-15 10:00:00 +0100' AND
timestamptz '2016-03-15 12:00:00 +0100') GROUP BY 1
;
Which results in:
time | count
------------------------+-------
2016-03-15 10:00:00+01 | 1
(1 row)
Which should be:
time: "2016-03-15 10:00:00 UTC" or "2016-03-15 11:00:00+01" ( i don't care about the time zone representation but this is simply the wrong result)
Anybody knows what I am doing wrong here?
The main problem I got stuck is that I want to be able to group/aggregate publications per day, with respect to the time zone of the user requesting the query. I don't care which time zone is returned as the front end can transform it to the user time zone.
Any feedback, help, or answer is highly appreciated. Many thanks