Question

I’m trying to render a Date field for my rails model as a datepicker.

The model looks like:

class Appointment
  include Mongoid::Document
  field :date, type: Date  
end

_form.html.haml view looks like:

= form_for @appointment, :url => {:action => :create} do |f| 
  = f.text_field(:date, {:class => 'datepicker'})
  %button{:type => 'submit'} Book appointment

:javascript
    jQuery(document).ready(function($) {
      $('.datepicker').datepicker();
    });

Controller action looks like:

class AppointmentsController < ApplicationController
  def create
    @appointment = Appointment.new(params[:appointment])

    # rest left out for demo purposes
  end
end

When “new” gets, called an error occurs:

ArgumentError in AppointmentsController#create

argument out of range

I know the value gets posted as MM/DD/YYYY, i.e. 03/11/2013

How can I tell Rails how to properly serialize this field?

Answer 1

Figured it out. I added another field, date_string just as an attr_accessor that won’t get stored in the db but can surface to the form, and can be used to convert to the internal date field. The model is changed to be:

class Appointment
  # extend these two to get accesss to drop down options
  include Mongoid::Document
  before_validation :parse_date_if_not_null

  #person info
  field :date, type: Date

  attr_protected :date
  attr_accessor :date_string

  def parse_date_if_not_null
    unless self.date_string.nil? || self.date_string == ''
      self.date = Date.strptime self.date_string, '%m/%d/%Y'
    end
  end
end

In the view, the date_string field is used:

= form_for @appointment, :url => {:action => :create} do |f| 
  = f.text_field(:date_field, {:class => 'datepicker'})
  %button{:type => 'submit'} Book appointment

:javascript
    jQuery(document).ready(function($) {
      $('.datepicker').datepicker();
    });

This works correctly and I’ve verified the field gets set in the db correctly.