Question

I have a form where i’m trying to validate that a field called “birthday” is not blank, and that the date is a valid date format that the Chronic gem can parse. I always get the error message “Birthday is invalid”. I’ve been trying a simple format “10/10/2010”.

How can i validate that the birthday field is of a format that chronic can parse?

User.rb model

class User < ActiveRecord::Base

  validates :birthday, :presence => true
  validate :birthday_is_date
  validate :position, :presence => true

  # validate the birthday format
  def birthday_is_date
    errors.add(:birthday ,Chronic.parse(birthday)) # testing to see the value of :birthday
    errors.add(:birthday, "is invalid test message") if ((Chronic.parse(:birthday) rescue ArgumentError) == ArgumentError)
  end
end

contacts_controller.rb

# POST /contacts/1/edit
    # actually updates the users data
    def update_user
        @userProfile = User.find(params[:id])

        respond_to do |format|
            if @userProfile.update_attributes(params[:user])
                format.html {
                    flash[:success] = "Information updated successfully"
                    redirect_to(profile_path)
                }
            else 
                format.html {
                    flash[:error] = resource.errors.full_messages

                    render :edit
                }
            end
        end
    end

Answer 1

Your birthday_is_date validation always adds an error on the first line. It should be written as follows:

def birthday_is_date
  errors.add(:birthday, "is invalid") unless Chronic.parse(birthday)
end