iPhone date picker, how to access individual items

Question

Task: Show a UIDatePicker and grab the selected date, then display the selected date in a label (in the format of Day, Month, Year).

Current progress:

-(IBAction)pressButton:(id)sender
{
    NSDate *selected = [datePicker date];
    NSString *message = [[NSString alloc] initWithFormat:@"%@", selected];

    date.text = message;
}

This will display the date in the format of YYYY-MM-DD 23:20:11 +0100. I do not want to display the time. I also want to display the date in a different format.

Is it possible to access the individual components of the date picker ie. datePicker.month

Any solutions or links is greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Datepicker is a special case uipickerview so you might be able to get the value in each component but I am not in front of Xcode to verify that.

You could however use NSDateFormatter to change the nsdateformatter returned to you into whatever format you are looking for.

Answer 2

What you want is the descriptionWithCalendarFormat:timeZone:locale: method. See Apple's description of the method.

For instance, to display the date in just the YYYY-MM-DD format, you'd use:

NSString *message = [selected descriptionWithCalendarFormat: @"%Y-%m-%d" timeZone: nil locale: nil]

I believe the format string here uses the same tokens as strptime from the C standard library, but there may be some minor discrepancies, knowing Apple. A description of that format is here.

You could also use the NSDateFormatter class' stringFromDate: method. It uses a different format (the Unicode format). I believe it is the "preferred" way to format date strings in Objective C, but it's probably a bit more complicated to use as well.

Finally, see this SO question for information on extracting individual NSDate components.

Hope that helps.

Answer 3

If you're talking about accessing the individual components of the date picker, you can't. UIDatePicker doesn't inherit from UIPickerView, so they don't have API. However, the documentation does state that UIDatePicker "manages a custom picker-view object as a subview", which means you could traverse a UIDatePicker's subviews until you found a UIPickerView. Note that this is pretty risky, however.