Question

I have a jquery calendar for the start date of a project.

Using Watir (automated browser driver, a gem for ruby), I have a set date that I would like to enter in.

The calendar start date is always today’s date, whatever that may be for the day it is used. I was wondering if there was a way that ruby can process what today’s date is, and use the specified date provided by the user, to calculate the difference of months between them.

Here is an example of the Calendar plugin: http://jqueryui.com/datepicker/

example:

today’s date is 30/10/2012, if there was a project that were to start on the 20/12/2012, that would be 2 months from now, so 2 clicks on the next month button.

Is there a way I could do this?

Answer 1

You could do:

#End date converted to date object
specified_date = '20/12/2012'
end_date = Date.parse(specified_date)

#Start date (today - 30/10/2012)
today  = Date.today

#Determine difference in months
number_of_months_up_to_today = (today.month + today.year * 12)
number_of_months_up_to_end = (end_date.month + end_date.year * 12)
clicks_required = number_of_months_up_to_end - number_of_months_up_to_today
#=> 2

Basically it is counting the number of months since the year 0 and then finding the difference.