Question

At first: thats not issue of wrong zone. In irb and database everything is fine. Problem occurs when I want to display dates (created_at, updated_at and all defined by myself in every model) in my views. I was trying to set time zone in application.rb and remove time formats from initializers and that didn’t solved my issue.

schema information generated by Annotate gem:

#  created_at                      :datetime
#  updated_at                      :datetime
#  publish_at                      :datetime

from irb:

1.9.2-p290 :004 > Time.zone
 => (GMT+00:00) UTC 
1.9.2-p290 :005 > Time.zone.now
 => Fri, 24 Feb 2012 12:14:04 UTC +00:00 
1.9.2-p290 :006 > Time.now
 => 2012-02-24 13:14:07 +0100

Examples:

1.9.2-p290 :007 > Article.last
  Article Load (0.3ms)  SELECT `articles`.* FROM `articles` ORDER BY `articles`.`id` DESC LIMIT 1
 => #<... created_at: "2012-02-24 12:04:24", updated_at: "2012-02-24 12:04:24", publish_at: "2012-02-24 12:04:24"...> 

App displays:

Created_at 2012-02-24 12:02,
Updated_at 2012-02-24 12:02,
Publish_at 2012-02-24 12:02,

1.9.2-p290 :008 > Article.first
  Article Load (0.5ms)  SELECT `articles`.* FROM `articles` LIMIT 1
=> #<...created_at: "2012-01-30 10:28:07", updated_at: "2012-02-08 17:20:41", publish_at: "2012-02-08 17:20:33"...> 

App displays:

Created_at 2012-01-30 10:01,
Updated_at 2012-02-08 17:02,
Publish_at 2012-02-08 17:02

this applies whole app (including active_admin)

Sorry for my English 😉 Any ideas what is the reason of my problem?

Answer 1

I’ve got it 🙂 That was silly, but maybe someone will need reminder: App gets format from locale yml file first (thats only way to set date format in active admin; formats from initializers doesn’t matter):

time:
  formats:
    default: "%Y-%m-%d"
    short: "%b %d"
    long: "%Y-%m-%d %H:%m"

and ofc minutes in long format should be %M (not %m)