Ruby on Rails time helper

Question

I'm working on my first Rails Application. I am a little stuck with the time. I'm working on a recipe application. I need to add two fields.

• Preparation Time
• Cook Time

Out of the two, i would like to add the two fields to come up with the Total Time needed to prepare the meal.

I approached it the wrong way which doesn't have logic :(. Basically i have two fields and i used f.select to select predefined times. But the problem i have with that approach is that when adding the two, it ignores the Gregorian format e.g 40 minutes + 50 mins will become 90 Min instead of 1hour 30.

I would appreciate any help from the community.

Answer 1

A quick example:

prep_time = 40.minutes
cook_time = 50.minutes

total_time = prep_time + cook_time
formatted_total_time = Time.at(total_time).gmtime.strftime('%I:%M')

# outputs 01:30 which is HOURS:MINUTES format

If you wanted 90 minutes instead:

formatted_total_time = total_time / 60

# outputs 90

---

Update:

Put this in the helper file associated with whatever view you are using this in (i.e. app/helpers/recipes_helper.rb)

module RecipesHelper

  def convert_to_gregorian_time(prep_time, cook_time)
    # returns as 90 mins instead of 1hr30mins
    return (prep_time + cook_time) / 60
  end

end

Then you'd just call it in your view (i.e. app/views/recipes/show.html.haml like:

# Note: this is HAML code... but ERB should be similar

%p.cooking_time
  = convert_to_gregorian_time(@recipe.prep_time, @recipe.cook_time)

If you are storing the times in the database as integers (which you SHOULD be doing), then you can do this:

%p.cooking_time
  = convert_to_gregorian_time(@recipe.prep_time.minutes, @recipe.cook_time.minutes)

where @recipe.prep_time is an integer with a value of 40 and @recipe.cook_time is an integer with a value of 50

and your database schema would look something like:

# == Schema Information
#
# Table name: recipes
#
#  id                 :integer         not null, primary key
#  prep_time          :integer
#  cook_time          :integer
#  # other fields in the model...