Filtering on DateTime in Django doesn't work

Question

I have an SQLite database with a timestamp column defined as a DateTime field. It contains values like 2014-10-14T14:51:07.558

My Django model has the following field:

timestamp = models.DateTimeField(db_column='timestamp', blank=False)

Then, when I run the following code, I get an empty set as a result:

Model.objects.filter(timestamp=Model.objects.all()[0].timestamp)

or

edit: removed a 'contains' call

Querying

Model.objects.all()[0].timestamp

returns

datetime.datetime(2014, 10, 14, 14, 51, 7, 558000, tzinfo=<UTC>)

Why can't I filter?

Answer 1

Datetimes are not strings; a datetime is a single object, so it can't 'contain' anything other than itself exactly. According to the django docs though , sqlite doesn't have a native datetime type, and django uses strings instead, but in python datetimes are not strings.
The docs aren't clear about what should happen filtering datetime fields using __contains, but it doesn't make much sense to me to do so. If you are trying to check whether a specific datetime falls within a range, use __range .

That said, you tried a straight = filter, and it didn't have any effect. Try filtering against str(<datetime>) since it will be a string in sqlite.