Consider extending DateTimeImmutable about date-time

[BenMorel]

Hi,

LocalDateTime represents a different concept from ZonedDateTime and PHP's DateTimeInterface: a date and time without a time-zone; so it makes no sense to extend DateTimeImmutable.

This is precisely what I dislike in PHP's implementation: a single class is used to represent many concepts (local date, local time, local date-time, date-time with a time zone, ...)

As for ZonedDateTime, extending DateTimeImmutable would create more problems than it solves, as ZonedDateTime would suddenly inherit from methods that return a DateTimeImmutable, which is very confusing, and some methods would conflict, such as getTimeZone().

For interoperability, what's necessary is a fromDateTime() and a toDateTime() method. The former is already implemented, while the latter is not.

I'm leaving this issue open until toDateTime() is implemented!

[BenMorel]

Consensus always wins, I guess! 😉

Added in 91a0c9c and released in 0.1.8.

[solodkiy]

The main problem with DateTimeImmutable is absence of easy way to convert it to DateTime (many libs still expect this type).

[natebrunette]

I agree, I think that interoperability with native PHP date classes is worth the method.

[BenMorel]

Fixed in 052c9d7 and released in version 0.1.6:

New method:

ZonedDateTime::toDateTime() : converts the ZonedDateTime to a native DateTime object.

Note that I hesitated to add a toDateTimeImmutable() method as well, but because it's trivial, I think we should leave this to the user:

$dateTime = $zonedDateTime->toDateTime();
$dateTimeImmutable = \DateTimeImmutable::createFromMutable($dateTime);

[jkuchar]

Why not return DateTimeImmutable in method toDateTime()? As DateTime is broken implementation. It mutable value object. I do not see any point in using DateTime class for anything.

[BenMorel]

Good question, I guess the choice I made was purely because of the naming: toDateTime() would return a DateTime.

I pretty much never use PHP's DateTime classes myself, so I'm not sure which of DateTime and DateTimeImmutable people use most and what they would expect here.

This can be changed in 0.9 if needed, but I'd love to hear other people's opinion here.

[BenMorel]

Note that PHP 7.3 added a DateTime::createFromImmutable() factory method (not documented yet), but this is not relevant anyway as brick/datetime targets PHP 7.1 at the moment.

@solodkiy makes a good point here, and it makes sense to keep the DateTime return type IMO.

Should we add toDateTimeImmutable() methods then? I still think that it clutters the API with methods that just call DateTimeImmutable::createFromMutable().

Let me know what you think.

[jkuchar]

I still think that it clutters the API with methods that just call DateTimeImmutable::createFromMutable().

Yep, it is definitely hard to read and it is quite common use-case. It makes sense to me to implemented also toDateTimeImmutable() as it is something cheap to do and makes it easy to cooperated with other PHP code (e.g. template filters, etc.)