How do i write a cleaner date picker input for SimpleForm

Question

I love the simple_form gem for rails but i dont like this line of code:

<%= f.input :deadline, :as => :string, :input_html => { :class          


        

Answer 1

An other option could also be to overwrite the default DateTimeInput helper, here's an example to be placed in app/inputs/date_time_input.rb

class DateTimeInput < SimpleForm::Inputs::DateTimeInput
  def input
    add_autocomplete!
    @builder.text_field(attribute_name, input_html_options.merge(datetime_options(object.send(attribute_name))))
  end

  def label_target
    attribute_name
  end

  private

    def datetime_options(value = nil)
      return {} if value.nil?

      current_locale = I18n.locale
      I18n.locale = :en

      result = []
      result.push(I18n.localize(value, { :format => "%a %d %b %Y" })) if input_type =~ /date/
      if input_type =~ /time/
        hours_format = options[:"24hours"] ? "%H:%M" : "%I:%M %p"
        result.push(I18n.localize(value, { :format => hours_format }))
      end

      I18n.locale = current_locale

      { :value => result.join(', ').html_safe }
    end

    def has_required?
      options[:required]
    end

    def add_autocomplete!
      input_html_options[:autocomplete] ||= 'off'
    end
end

Please notice than while using this method makes it a drop feature for your forms, it might also break with future versions of simple_form.

Notice about localized dates: As far as I know Ruby interprets dates following only a few formats, you might want to be careful before localizing them and make sure Ruby can handle them. An attempt to better localization support on the Ruby Date parsing as been started at https://github.com/ZenCocoon/I18n-date-parser, yet, this is not working.