Rails ActiveRecord date parsing for i18n (specifically european date formats).

Question

I'm working on a rails project for an Australian website. As a result, they want to be able to enter date formats in the more european-standard of 'dd/mm/yyyy' rather than the US-centric 'mm/dd/yyyy'. I have an ActiveRecord model with a Date field. I'm using jQuery's datepicker to provide the date select on a text field, and have it setting the date to a proper format. But, when I try to save the record, it gets the date wrong. Even when I've set the custom date formats in an intializer according to the i18n guide.

>> b = BlogPost.new
>> b.posted_on = '20/07/2010'
=> "20/07/2010"
>> b.posted_on 
=> nil
>> b.posted_on = '07/20/2010'
=> Tue, 20 Jul 2010

It seems that Rails is just using Date.parse to convert the string into a Date object. Is there any way to fix this for the whole project? I don't want to have to write custom code for each model.

Answer 1

Try to change the default date format (in config/environment.rb)

ActiveSupport::CoreExtensions::Time::Conversions::DATE_FORMATS.
    merge!(default => '%d/%m/%Y %H:%M')

Find out more here http://blog.nominet.org.uk/tech/2007/06/14/date-and-time-formating-issues-in-ruby-on-rails/