Set date format in ruby model (sinatra/datamapper)

Question

Hi,

I have a ruby model that contains a date attribue which I'd like to be able to pass in as a parameter in the format dd/MM/yyyy.

However, my sqlite3 db stores the data in yyyy-MM-dd format so when a date like 20/10/2010 gets passed in, it will not be read to the database.

I am using the Sinatra framework and using haml for the markup creation.

Do I need to write a helper that takes the date string and converts it to the correct format for the db? Or can I set a format type on the models attribute?

Thanks.

Answer 1

You shouldn't need to worry about the database's internal representation of the date; DataMapper is there to do that for you. You just need to make sure you are passing it a valid Date object.

Check out http://ruby-doc.org/core/classes/Date.html for methods available to the Date class. For your example:

require 'date'
mydate = '20/10/2010'
mydate_obj = Date::strptime(mydate, '%d/%m/%Y')
puts "#{mydate_obj}" # prints 2010-10-20