Question

As much as I love rails, I’ve always hated dealing with dates in an html form…especially when the date isn’t an object’s property.

The select_date helper is nice, but it always generates this:

<select name="date[year]" id="date_year">
<select name="date[month]" id="date_month">
<select name="date[day]" id="date_day">

And I can’t figure out a way to change the name prefix from “date” to something else. Is there a way to do this? What do you all use for date inputs when they’re not an object property?

Answer 1

You can use the :prefix option to do this.

<%= select_date(nil, :prefix => 'payday') %>

Which generates this:

<select id="payday_year" name="payday[year]">
<select id="payday_month" name="payday[month]">
<select id="payday_day" name="payday[day]">

More examples here

http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionView/Helpers/DateHelper.html#method-i-select_date