In my 15+ years of web development, there are very few things I can say are unequivocally a good idea. It almost always does depend. Storing timestamps instead of booleans, however, is one of those things I can go out on a limb and say it doesn’t really depend all that much. You might as well timestamp it. There are pl...
  • Domi@lemmy.secnd.meEnglish
    61·
    1 year ago

    Much better to just have two columns, so e.g. you can see “enabled” and an 'enabled_date" that indicates when you last enabled/disabled the entity.

    That sounds good until you realize you now have two sources of truth, do you trust enabled or enabled_date? If you really want to go this route enabled should be a virtual field that checks enabled_date in the background so you can have the boolean semantics but still keep a single field.

    I also used booleans a lot previously but since using Laravel I have come to enjoy the updated_at, created_at and deleted_at fields that it automatically creates and I follow this format as well now if I need more.