Submitting dates in US format: mm/dd/yyyy

Question

I can get Rails to display mm/dd/yyyy using the following initializer:

date_format.rb

 Date::DATE_FORMATS[:default]="%m/%d/%Y"

or l18n using this answer

But this does not change the way dates are submitted. When submitted:

10/02/2014

Will be parsed as

 @entry.photo_date
 Mon, 10 Feb 2014

I'm looking for a way to submit a date in mm/dd/yyyy format.

I'd like to be able to do this centrally, so I do not have to repeat code throughout the application

Answer 1

In modern ruby (ie. with prepend) you can insert your own type casting in front of Rails's. You'll want to do this for whatever other date/time formats you're using. Here's the code for Date, just stick this in an config/initializers/typecasts.rb or somewhere:

module Typecasting
  module Date
    def cast_value v
      ::Date.strptime v, "%m/%d/%Y" rescue super
    end  
  end  

  ::ActiveRecord::Type::Date.prepend Date
end

Rails will try the American format and fall back to using the builtin method if that didn't work.

Answer 2

Try this:

irb(main):001:0> today = Date.today
=> Tue, 06 Jan 2015
irb(main):003:0> today.strftime("%m/%d/%Y")
=> "01/06/2015"

So in your case, @entry.photo_date.strftime("%m/%d/%Y") should work.