In my Laravel hobby project, I had a field called date_covered defined as a date type, with now() as the default value.
However, when I needed to manipulate this field, for example, displaying a range like 02.12.2023 – 02.11.2024—it became clear that a single date column wasn’t ideal. Using date works fine when storing a single date (example: 02.12.2023), but not when you need to represent a date range in one field.
One quick workaround is to switch the column type from date to string. This allows you to store values like “02.12.2023 – 02.11.2024”.
But there’s a trade-off here, you lose the ability to treat these values as actual dates for calculations (example invoice generation or date-based queries).
Better fix: Split the field into two separate columns, start_covered_date and end_covered_date, both of type date.
This way, you can still perform date calculations, comparisons, and formatting while keeping your data clean and meaningful.
Hopefully this helps!