Rails. How to store time of day (for schedule)?

Question

I\'m writing an app that keeps track of school classes.

I need to store the schedule. For example: Monday-Friday from 8:am-11am.

I was think

Answer 1

Check out the gem 'tod' for Rails 4 or Time_of_Day for Rails 3. They both solve the problem of storing time in a database while using an an Active Record model.

SQL has a time data type but Ruby does not. Active Record addresses this difference by representing time attributes using Ruby’s Time class on the canonical date 2000-01-01. All Time attributes are arbitrarily assigned the same dates. While the attributes can be compared with one another without an issue, (the dates are the same), errors arise when you attempt to compare them with other Time instances. Simply using Time.parse on a string like ”10:05” adds today’s date to the output.

Lailson Bandeira created a created solution for this problem, the Time_of_Day gem for Rails 3. Unfortunately the gem is no longer maintained. Use Jack Christensen’s ‘tod’ gem instead. It works like a charm.

Answer 2

This ruby gem converts time of day to seconds since midnight and back. The seconds value is stored in the database and can be used for calculations and validations.

Define the time of day attributes:

class BusinessHour < ActiveRecord::Base
  time_of_day_attr :opening, :closing
end

Converts time of day to seconds since midnight when a string was set:

business_hour = BusinessHour.new(opening: '9:00', closing: '17:00')
business_hour.opening
 => 32400
business_hour.closing
 => 61200

To convert back to time of day:

TimeOfDayAttr.l(business_hour.opening)
 => '9:00'
TimeOfDayAttr.l(business_hour.closing)
 => '17:00'

You could also omit minutes at full hour:

TimeOfDayAttr.l(business_hour.opening, omit_minutes_at_full_hour: true)
 => '9'