I've run into a spot of bother with date formats in our Rails application.
I have a date field in our view which I want to be formatted as dd/mm/yy. This is how the user will expect to enter their dates, and the datepicker control uses this format.
However, Active Record seems to be expecting mm/dd/yy.
If I enter 01/03/2010, this gets put in as 03 January 2010.
If I enter 25/03/2010, this gets put in a null.
How do I get ActiveRecord to expect Her Majesties date format?
Rails' DateTime tries to detect the formatting automatically. It will detect the following formats: mm/dd/yy or dd-mm-yy or yyyy-mm-dd or yyyy/mm/dd. You could monkey-patch DateTime.parse, but I would rather move this issue to the View of your application.
I always recommend to use yyyy-mm-dd [hh:mm:ss] as a string representation for a date. Check the documentation of your DatePicker if it supports multiple date-formats.
The jQuery date-picker for example has this covered with dateFormat (for the data that is sent to the server, set this to yyyy-mm-dd) as well as altFormat (for the input the user sees, set this to dd/mm/yyyy).
Add a file called rails_defaults.rb to config\initializers directory; with following lines:
Date::DATE_FORMATS[:default] = '%d/%m/%Y'
Time::DATE_FORMATS[:default]= '%d/%m/%Y %H:%M:%S'
Restart the server and you are good to go.