This was asked on the forum, so I thought I would place it here too.

Problem

Suppose you have a model that resembles the following:

  range:
    id:                                   
    start_date: {type: date}
    end_date: {type: date}

And you want to know the following: are there any records where either $date1 or $date2 is between start_date and end_date?

Consider that $date2 could be some fixed $offset from $date1, so that the question becomes: are there any records which partially cover the $offset period following $date1?

Using Criterion Objects

Since the BETWEEN construct is unavailable through Propel (at least not as an object or constant), we have to use the knowledge that:

if
  a >= x
and
  a <= y
then
  x <= a <= y

Which gives us:

$c = new Criteria();
 
$date1 = '2007-08-20';
$date2 = '2008-08-20';
 
// test against date1
$date1Criterion = $c->getNewCriterion(RangePeer::START_DATE, $date1, Criteria::LESS_EQUAL);
 
// test against date2
$date2Criterion = $c->getNewCriterion(RangePeer::START_DATE, $date2, Criteria::LESS_EQUAL);
 
// conjunction
$date1Criterion->addAnd($c->getNewCriterion(RangePeer::END_DATE, $date1, Criteria::GREATER_EQUAL));
$date2Criterion->addAnd($c->getNewCriterion(RangePeer::END_DATE, $date2, Criteria::GREATER_EQUAL));
 
// disjunction
$date1Criterion->addOr($date2Criterion);
$c->add($date1Criterion);

Using Criteria::CUSTOM

Or if you absolutely must have your BETWEEN, try this:

$c = new Criteria();
 
$date1 = '2007-08-20';
$date2 = '2008-08-20';
 
$c->add(RangePeer::START_DATE, "'{$date1}' between ".RangePeer::START_DATE." and ".RangePeer::END_DATE, Criteria::CUSTOM);
$c->addOr(RangePeer::START_DATE, "'{$date2}' between ".RangePeer::START_DATE." and ".RangePeer::END_DATE, Criteria::CUSTOM);

Note that the first arguments to Criteria::add() and Criteria::addOr() can be any column, but they must be the same column.

Note also that when providing the argument, {$dateN} appears between single quotes. It must appear quoted (and escaped) in order for this query to return correct (or any) results.

Thanks to netcrash from the symfony irc channel I came along regular expressions in MySQL: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/4.1/en/regexp.html

Tutorial: http://www.brainbell.com/tutorials/MySQL/Using_MySQL_Regular_Expressions.htm

I'm using it to select all entries that don't start with a letter in an alphabetical pagination:

$c = new Criteria();
$regex = CmsUserPeer :: USERNAME." NOT REGEXP '^[[:alpha:]]'";
$c->add(CmsUserPeer :: USERNAME, $regex, Criteria::CUSTOM);
$this->cms_user = CmsUserPeer :: doSelect($c);

Instead of selecting by REGEXP pookey had the idea of "using substr to get the first char, then getting it's character code, and doing a BETWEEN on it" for performance reasons.

There is another faster solution:

$c = new Criteria();
$cq = "substring( ".CmsUserPeer :: USERNAME.", 1, 1 ) NOT BETWEEN  'a' AND  'z'";
$c->add(CmsUserPeer :: USERNAME, $cq, Criteria::CUSTOM);
$this->cms_user = CmsUserPeer :: doSelect($c);