Rails 3 date_select for year only

Question

I have a form in my Rails 3 app where I want to create a select tag for just the year on a method :grad_year. I have everything working - and storing - properly using date_select and adding :discard_month and :discard_day. However when I render @profile.grad_year I get the month and day values. So I'm wondering how to store and render only the year for @profile.grad_year?

Here is the form:

<%= f.date_select :grad_year, {:start_year => Time.now.year, :end_year => Time.now.year - 95, :discard_day => true, :discard_month => true}, :selected => @profile.grad_year %>

In my migration:

t.date :grad_year

Answer 1

Rails has a select_year helper:

http://apidock.com/rails/ActionView/Helpers/DateHelper/select_year

So your code should look like:

f.select_year(Date.today, :start_year => Time.now.year, :end_year => Time.now.year - 95, :field_name => 'grad_year')

Answer 2

Assembling all of the above from @alex_peattie's answer, I arrived at the following:

<%= select_year Date.today, :start_year => Time.now.year, :end_year => Time.now.year - 95, :field_name => :grad_year, :prefix => :profile  %>

As with the OP's question, my case was done within a form_for block, so f.select_year threw an exception. But if you just use the documented :field_name option, the tag will have the id date_grad_year and name date[grad_year] which are not what Rails expects. Using the (documented only at the very top of the API) :prefix option changes date to profile.

So this is better than the #@%$^*& html_options hash, which, despite using rails for 5 years now, I cannot seem to get right without five tries :-).

Oh Rails, how I love you, yet at the same time am sure glad Stack Overflow is around to help us all understand your delightful idiosyncrasies!

Answer 3

This select_year function is totally screwy.

Here is finally what works:

<%= form_for(@user) do |f| %>
 <%= select_year current_user.birth_year, { :prompt => "Year", 
                                            :start_year => Time.zone.now.year - 13, 
                                            :end_year => Time.zone.now.year - 80, 
                                            :field_name => :birth_year, 
                                            :prefix => :user }, 
                                            class:"form-control" %>
<% ... %>

it aught to be like this in rails:

<%= f.select_year :birth_year, { :prompt => "Year", 
                                            :start_year => Time.zone.now.year - 13, 
                                            :end_year => Time.zone.now.year - 80}, 
                                            class:"form-control" %>