can I use .to_s(:long) in Postgres with a column type date on Heroku in rails?

Question

I have a column type date (shown from annotate) on my Contacts table:

#  date_entered       :date(255)

This is the line of code that has worked for me locally on my sqlite3 database, but now generates an error in Heroku:

<%= contact.date_entered.to_s(:long) %>

The error that I get is:

wrong number of arguments (1 for 0)

I removed the :long component and it appears to work, but now, of course, looks badly formatted.

How do I address this?

Answer 1

Use

date.strftime('%m/%d/%Y')

for date formatting.

Also you can override to_s method for Date/Time to use I18n localization:

class Date
  def to_s format = :default
    I18n.l(self, :format => format)
  end
end

In this case can use both :logn (:default, :short) and '%d %B, %Y' formats.

UPD: Also it makes sense to store old method and call it in case you don't pass any params:

class Date
  alias :to_s :native_to_s

  def to_s format = nil
    format.nil? ? 
      self.native_to_s : 
      I18n.l(self, :format => format)
  end
end

Answer 2

Is that actually a postgres date field?

end_date           | date   

is what postgres has as a date field, can you check on the table itself? Also sticking contact.date_entered.class somewhere in a view to find out what the exact Ruby class is.

I have a huge hunch that it is not a timestamp or date field. Most likely actually a text or varchar and thus ActiveRecord interprets it that way.