Formating of Time data

[natatkinson]

I have been working since February on a CMS for a Track & Field team, and teh whole system is coming along nicely.

 

For the storage of track results (times) I chose time without timestamp because it allowed decimal storage (this was actually the reason I chose PostgreSQL over MySQL).  But the only problem is PostgreSQL does not store trailing zeroes IF THEY ARE ENTERED.  Meaning, if you enter

00:00:08.10

 

it stores

 

00:00:08.1

 

Track uses 2 decimal points to notate that the time was recorded using a Fully Automated Computer Timing system, and older hand times are only notated using 1 or 0 decimal places.  So how the time is displayed is actually important.

 

I've been messing around with a way to get the data to store correctly, but I don't think I can change that, so now I am trying to get the data to display correctly on the php pages, and I'm having alot of trouble.  My last attempt I added a column to the results table called 'precision', so each result would specify if it had 0, 1, or 2 decimal points of precision.  I was then going to use some sort of php number format to get this to work, but I got nowhere.

 

If anyone can help me, I would GREATLY appreciate it.  It is only a little issue, but it would really make my web application top notch.

 

For more info, test website is here: http://www.eiublue.com

 

and some of my documentation is here: http://pen.eiu.edu/~nratkinson2/db/EIUrunning%20CMS/

[natatkinson]

Okay, I have come up with solution that I think shoudl work.

 

When the data is input, I do a sscanf to find if the data is input with .0 or .00.

 

If it is, I store the decimal precisions in a variable, and add it to a column in the database.  Its a workaround, sad to say I have to do one, but as long as it works, i guess i'm happy.

[btherl]

I think that adding a precision column is the way to go.  A "numeric" type like timestamp simply cannot distinguish trailing zeros, because the values are numerically equivalent.  Like a floating point number 1.0 cannot be distinguished from 1.00, unless you store the precision separately.