ActiveRecord date format

Question

I've run into a spot of bother with date formats in our Rails application.

I have a date field in our view which I want to be formatted as dd/mm/yy. This is how the user will expect to enter their dates, and the datepicker control uses this format.

However, Active Record seems to be expecting mm/dd/yy.

If I enter 01/03/2010, this gets put in as 03 January 2010.

If I enter 25/03/2010, this gets put in a null.

How do I get ActiveRecord to expect Her Majesties date format?

Answer 1

Rails' DateTime tries to detect the formatting automatically. It will detect the following formats: mm/dd/yy or dd-mm-yy or yyyy-mm-dd or yyyy/mm/dd. You could monkey-patch DateTime.parse, but I would rather move this issue to the View of your application.

I always recommend to use yyyy-mm-dd [hh:mm:ss] as a string representation for a date. Check the documentation of your DatePicker if it supports multiple date-formats.

The jQuery date-picker for example has this covered with dateFormat (for the data that is sent to the server, set this to yyyy-mm-dd) as well as altFormat (for the input the user sees, set this to dd/mm/yyyy).

Answer 2

Add a file called rails_defaults.rb to config\initializers directory; with following lines:

Date::DATE_FORMATS[:default] = '%d/%m/%Y'
Time::DATE_FORMATS[:default]= '%d/%m/%Y %H:%M:%S'

Restart the server and you are good to go.

Answer 3

class Date
  class << self
    def _parse_with_us_format(date, *args)
      if date =~ %r{^(\d+)/(\d+)/(\d+)$}
        _parse_without_us_format("#{$3.length == 2 ? "20#{$3}" : $3}-#{$1}-#{$2}", *args)
      else
        _parse_without_us_format(date, *args)
      end
    end
    alias_method_chain :_parse, :us_format
  end
end