In Ruby on Rails, date parsing can be tricky, especially when dealing with date formats like DD/MM/YYYY. Rails' default behavior is to interpret date strings in the MM/DD/YYYY format. This can lead to serious issues when the day part falls between 1 and 12, causing the date to be misinterpreted.

#For instance:

If the date string is "11/05/2025", Rails interprets it as November 5th, 2025.

If the date string is "13/05/2025", Rails will fail to parse it correctly, resulting in nil.

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'active_record_date_validator'

And then execute:

$ bundle install

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install active_record_date_validator

This gem provides a simple way to validate date attributes in your ActiveRecord models. You can specify columns to exclude from validation using the exclude_columns option.

The valid dates for the bill_date attribute in the Invoice model are as follows:

Date object (e.g., Date.today)

Time object (e.g., Time.now)

ActiveSupport::TimeWithZone object (e.g., Time.zone.now)

nil (allowed as a valid value)

Non-date string (e.g., "invalid_date")

Valid date format as a string (e.g., "2023-05-20")

Malformed date string (e.g., "2025-99-99")

Integer value (e.g., 12345)

Array (e.g., [2023, 5, 20])

Hash (e.g., {year: 2023, month: 5, day: 20})

bill_date field is being validated, while created_at and updated_at fields are excluded from validation

class Invoice < ActiveRecord::Base
  validates_date exclude_columns: [:created_at, :updated_at]
end

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake spec to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and the created tag, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/[USERNAME]/active_record_date_validator. This project is intended to be a safe, welcoming space for collaboration, and contributors are expected to adhere to the code of conduct.

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.

Everyone interacting in the ActiveRecordDateValidator project's codebases, issue trackers, chat rooms and mailing lists is expected to follow the code of conduct.