StringifyTime

StrigifyTime is a gem that is modeled after the Railscast episode 033's stringify time rails plugin. I have created this gem for convenience and practice.

Blog Post @ PatrickPerey.com

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'stringify-time'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install stringify-time

Within an the model add stringify_time passing in a symbol for the attribute you want aliased as a virtual attribute string.

class Task < ActiveRecord::Base
  stringify_time :due_at
end

This will create the due_at_string getter and setter methods within the Task model. You can then access this attribute in the views like so:

_form.html.erb

<%= form_for @task do |f| %>
  ...
  <div class="field">
    <%= f.label :due_at_string %><br>
    <%= f.text_field :due_at_string %>
  </div>
  ...
<% end %>

In order to be able to submit this form and update the attribute, you must permit the generated attribute in your controller params if you are using Rails 4's Strong Paramaters.

def task_params
  params.require(:task).permit(:name, :due_at_string)
end

Your users are now able to type in the date into a text field instead of using the Rails' default datetime_select dropdowns.

You can then add a validation within the model using the due_at_invalid? method. due_at_invalid? returns true if there was an invalid input into the text field, ie an ArgumentError.

def validate
  errors.add(:due_at, 'is invalid') if due_at_invalid?
end

1. Fork it (http://github.com/the4dpatrick/stringify-time-gem)
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create new Pull Request