Josh Benner

Any Drupal developer worth his salt at least knows of the Views module. The shear usefulness and time-saving nature of views has earned the module a place in every Drupal site I've developed. However, because views are stored in the database and their presentation is controlled by the views module itself, managing views between staging/live sites, handling updates, and tracking revisions become difficult issues when dealing with Views.

I've been using CakePHP 1.2.x for projects at work, where our primary database back-end is Microsoft SQL Server. Maybe I'm just missing something, but it seems to me that SQL Server outputs datetime values in an odd way (by odd, I mean not parsable by strtotime). When pulling datetime values out of SQL Server, CakePHP will render them as PHP strings just as they are returned from the server, in this format:

Jan 10 2008 12:25:07:000PM

Now, strtotime parses incoming values according to GNU Date Input Format, which is incompatible with the output from SQL Server (note the milliseconds). To make life easier when working woth models that describe MSSQL tables with datetime fields, using this behavior can make things a little easier.

At work a few months ago, I was directed to started looking into some options for developing small database applications. So, I set out on my quest to find the best solution out there. Several weeks, and at least as many frameworks later, I finally found a solution that seems to work.