How to create “Upcoming birthdays” module in Rails?

Question

I have a table \"users\" with a column \"date_of_birth\" (DATE format with day, month, year). In frontend I need to list 5 upcoming birthdays.

Spent ages trying to w

Answer 1

I too thought that day of year would be the way to go, but the fact that it is different for most of the year depending on whether it is a leap year or not makes it tricky.

Better is to store the month and day as a string: d.strftime('%m%d'). You can then use that as (possibly) two queries (assuming new column is 'monthday')

First,

User.find(:all,
          :condition => [:monthday > Date.now.strftime('%m%d')],
          :select => "DISTINCT monthday",
          :limit => 5)

If you don't get 5 results, do the query again, except use "0101" instead of the date calculation and lower the limit.

This gets you a list of monthday strings that you then have to turn back into dates.

If you want users, remove the :select line.