datepicker jquery ui and rails 3(.1) - ruby-on-rails-3

Question

Hi i am using the date picker jquery ui in combination with rails 3.1. The date picker looks brilliant, only the date isn't stored in the database? Only sometimes...? So that's a difficult error.
This is my .js file:
$(function() {
$("#question_deadline").datepicker({ duration: 'fast', maxDate: '+2m', minDate: 'now', showOn: "button", buttonImage: "calendar.gif", buttonImageOnly: true });
$("#question_deadline").datepicker("option", "showAnim", "drop");
$("#question_deadline").datepicker("option", "dateFormat", "DD, d MM, yy");
});
In my controller there's just plain rails script:
def create
#question = Question.new(params[:question])
if #question.save
redirect_to questions_path, :notice => "Successfully created question."
else
setup_questions
render :index
end
end
In views file _form.html.erb i use a text_field to display the date:
<div class="field">
<%= f.label :content, "Question" %><br />
<%= f.text_field :content, :placeholder => "type your question here.." %>
<%= f.text_field :deadline %><br />
</div>
Are there people who have experience with datepiacker jquery ui and rails, the ryan bates episode, didn't solve it, i think that was written in rails 2.3?
Regards,
Thijs

Answer 1

First, you need to show us the view where you have the datepicker element. If it's like this:
<input type="text" name="question_deadline" id="question_deadline" />
When you submit this form, the parameters you receive in your controller (in the method "create") is called question_deadline. So in that create method you should first write:
if params[:question_deadline] != ""
params[:question][:question_deadline] = params[:question_deadline]
end
#add a else if this date field is compulsory in the database
This step is important because the create method will read stuff from params[:question][:question_deadline] not from params[:question_deadline] which is returned from the view.
Thus params[:question][:question_deadline] is empty when you do #question.save
To display the date, you also need to show us the controller "show" method that should be something like:
#question = Question.find(params[:id]) #or any sql request that returns info about a question.
Then in the view you can retrieve it simply with:
<%= #question.question_deadline%>
Maybe with more code from you controller and view I can elaborate on that.

Answer 2

I think, Rails/Ruby is not able to parse a date in this format:
$("#question_deadline").datepicker("option", "dateFormat", "DD, d MM, yy");
// full day name, day (w/o leading zero), full month name, 4-digit year
In your controller, you might want to add a line such as
def create/update
...
#question.deadline = DateTime.strptime(params[:question][:deadline], '%A, %d %B, %Y')
# assuming my jquery-to-ruby format-mapping is adequate ;-)
if #question.save
...
end
Beware, that this code easily breaks on malformed date strings.
If you don't want to change the format to, e.g. 'yy-mm-dd' (in Ruby-land it's '%Y-%m-%d'), you may want to populate the selected date to another HTML element using the altField option and hide the actual datepicker input field via CSS:
$("#somewhere_else").datepicker(
dateFormat: "%yy-%mm-%dd",
altField: "#question_deadline",
altFormat: "DD, d MM, yy",
...
);
<%= form_for #question do |f| %>
...
<%= text_field_tag 'somewhere_else', #question.deadline %>
<%= f.hidden_field :deadline %>
...
<% end %>
That'll work, at least for me :-)
—Dominik

Answer 3

The other option is to update the way ActiveSupport parses dates. This is outlined in Default Date Format in Rails (Need it to be ddmmyyyy)