Question

I have a rails form that has a datetime input.

I’d like to make the date input a single text box which the user will input in MM/DD/YYYY format (or via a jQuery datepicker) and then have the time inputs be 12 hour based time drop downs. I found this plugin – http://code.google.com/p/rails-twelve-hour-time-plugin/ – to handle the 12 hour time part but I’m not sure how to make the date (and only the date) a single textbox.

I was able to change it into multiple textboxes instead of multiple drop downs via this plugin – http://www.railslodge.com/plugins/981-date-time-text-field-helpers

I’d like to do it with minimal controller logic so if its possible to name the fields in such a way that rails knows how to concatenate them that would be ideal.

Answer 1

In a single textfield you can only do that by a javascript mask, creating hidden fields with each part of the date in the input field.

If you’re gonna have to use javascript anyway, use it to select the date or trust an user to input the date in a specified format, both scenarios would give you a formatted string, so you could simply parse it with

# params[:date_as_str] = "2010/07/29 10:00 AM"
object.date = DateTime.strptime(params[:date_as_str], "%Y/%m/%d %H:%M %p")

you could also create a custom helper to make that “mask” of javascript on the single text field.