Question

I’m creating a 24 hour dropdown with 30 minute increments for a set time when someone wants to arrive at a destination and was wondering is there a good format to use and how do you convert it to type Time (since I am storing it in the database as a Time type).

These are the options I am using:

  def options_for_hours_select
    [
      ['4 AM','4'],
      ['4:30 AM','430'],
      #etc
    ]
  end

Answer 1

If you are using 30 minute increments, you could change use numeric option values, like this:

def options_for_hours_select
  [
    ["4 AM", 4],
    ["4:30 AM", 4.5]
  ]
end

then, when you want to convert it to a time, you can just add that many hours to the start of the day, (ActiveSupport makes this particularly easy) e.g.:

Date.today + 4.5.hours # gives 4:30AM today

and if you have two parameters :date and :arrival_time, you could combine them like this:

time = params[:date].to_date + params[:arrival_time].hours