Question

I have a form where the user will select a date range, and then a report will be presented based on that date range.

The relevant bit of my Rails form looks like this…

<div class="field">
<b>Start Date</b><br />
<%= date_select :startDate, options = {:order => [:day, :month, :year]} %>
</div>

<div class="field">
<b>End Date</b><br />
<%= date_select :endDate, options = {:order => [:day, :month, :year]} %>
</div>

However, I’m having trouble figuring out how to access the resulting dates in the controller. I’ve put the following diagnostics in the controller,

puts params[:startDate]
puts params[:endDate]
puts Date.today

…and this shows,

orderdaymonthyear(1i)2011orderdaymonthyear(2i)3orderdaymonthyear(3i)21
orderdaymonthyear(1i)2011orderdaymonthyear(2i)10orderdaymonthyear(3i)21
2011-10-21

My search, is defined at follows,

SalesActivity.find(:all, :conditions => {:created_at => params[:startDate]..params[:endDate]})

…and this gives the exception, ‘bad value for range’.

Pointers to how to pass and use a Date range would be appreciated.

Answer 1

Thanks to the helpful suggested answers, I learned that the area I needed to dig into was multiparameter attributes. However, the answer referenced by Julik seems more complex than what I need.

However, I did find this,

http://snippets.dzone.com/posts/show/4630

Which gave me what I was looking for so, my [now working] code looks like this,

@start_date = Date.civil(params[:range][:"startDate(1i)"].to_i,
                         params[:range][:"startDate(2i)"].to_i,
                         params[:range][:"startDate(3i)"].to_i)

@end_date   = Date.civil(params[:range][:"endDate(1i)"].to_i,
                         params[:range][:"endDate(2i)"].to_i,
                         params[:range][:"endDate(3i)"].to_i)

Thanks again for the help.