Question

I’ve got a Model Task with a member due_date. I’m using Chronic to take natural language input from the user and convert it to a Time, which then gets saved to the model.

I’m just not sure the best Rails, MVC-ish way to handle these use cases:

1. Display a formatted string (with some logic involved) to the user every time I show Task.due_date
2. Allow the user to input plaintext and have it parsed automagically everywhere they can edit Task.due_date

A helper method to format time was my first idea, like this:

<%= format_time task.due_date %>

combined with an overloaded setter on an accessor in my Task model, like this:

attr_accessor :due_date_string

def due_date_string=(string)
  self.due_date = Chronic.parse(string)
end

This works everywhere I want it to except in my forms for editing:

<div class="field">
  <%= f.label :due_date %>
  <%= f.text_field :due_date_string %>
</div> 

I don’t know how to make the f.text_field element ‘wire up’ properly so that it saves to :due_date_string, but uses the helper method to display the string.

I don’t necessarily need specific code examples, just looking for the kind of pattern that pro Rails-ers would use here.

Thanks!

Answer 1

With according to MVC conventions, data handle is about Model layer responsibility.
So you are going in right direction to do a setter (wrapper for due_date attribute):

You need to check that is attr_acessible that is access to get a data from params

def due_date_string=(string)
  self.due_date = Chronic.parse(string) || Date.today
end

The representation logic to show the parsed date is Helper layer responsibility