I have an application where user sets his/her preferred date/time format. User is expected to enter datetime in his preferred format across the application. Now the problem is for few formats the datetime is parsed wrongly while create/update ActiveRecord.
For example user has set date/time format in hh:mm dd/MM/yyyy. Now if user enters 17:00 04/05/2012 it parses it as 5 PM 5 Apr, 2012 where it should be 5 PM 4 May, 2012 1.8.7 :004 > a = Article.create!(:name => 'a1', :published_at => '17:00 04/05/2012') => #<Article id: 2, name: "a1", published_at: "2012-04-05 17:00:00", created_at: "2012-04-16 13:54:36", updated_at: "2012-04-16 13:54:36"> I understand that ruby/rails has predefined set of formats against which the date/time string is evaluated and if matches any format in sequence it parses given string with that format/ 1.8.7 :006 > a = Article.create!(:name => 'a1', :published_at => '17:00 15/12/2012') => #<Article id: 4, name: "a1", published_at: nil, created_at: "2012-04-16 13:55:43", updated_at: "2012-04-16 13:55:43"> Here user entered 15 December, 2012 which was parsed to nil. I understand that ruby/rails was not able to match any predefined format and hence returns nil. Someone has already asked similar questions (http://stackoverflow.com/q/2529990 and http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/57923) but the solution seems not applicable in my case as I don't want single datetime format across the application as each user will have his own preferred datetime format. Now to work with multiple datetime format, we are planning to manipulate it before the params is passed to the ActiveRecord. So the steps would like 1. Read datetime from params map 2. Parse it with user's preferred datetime format 3. Format datetime to the default format used by ActiveRecord 4. Replace current datetime in params with re-formatted datetime Here is a snippet of the controller class ArticlesController < ApplicationController before_filter :format_date_time, :only => [:create, :update] ... ... private def format_date_time datetime = params[:datetime] params[:datetime] = DateTime.strptime(datetime, pref_date_time_format).strftime('%c') end end Would anyone please verify if it is right approach or not? Also I would appreciate someone outlines better ways to accomplish this. Thanks, Amit Patel -- Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby on Rails: Talk" group. To post to this group, send email to rubyonrails-talk@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to rubyonrails-talk+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-talk?hl=en.
