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

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'stringify-time'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install stringify-time

Usage

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 %>

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

Contributing

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