Intelligence when segmenting a datetime value

Question

I have a datetime value in my Event model. Not being a big fan of the default aesthetics of Cake's automagical input, I'm going to create my own. My understanding, though only from reading, is that Cake provides some intelligence around concatenating datetime values on save. Specifically, it will detect month, day, year, hour, minute and meridian subparts of a datetime value and automatically combine them on save.

What I'm more interested in, but can find no evidence of, is a simpler breakdown. I'd like to use a date picker for the date part and the default time input for, you guessed it, the time. Can Cake do this? I have tried it and it's not working, but I'm not sure whether that's a result of me doing the wrong thing or the right thing not being available.

I can certainly do this myself without much effort, but some effort is greater than no effort if Cake already has this built-in and I'm just not unlocking it properly.

Thanks.

Answer 1

A trip through the source code, specifically Model::deconstruct() told me that Cake's native intelligence doesn't run this deep. It expects the full component granularity provided by its own datetime input (i.e. separate datetime components for month, day, year, hour, minute and meridian). I wanted a better user experience, so I wanted to use a date picker that stores the entire date as a single component. To do that I had to get creative.

What I chose to do was to override the Model::deconstruct() method to break down the date into its components. Here's some code to help visualize the solution I expect to deploy:

# 
# In my form (views/events/_form.ctp)
# When rendered, the input names resolve to data[Event][start_time][date], 
# data[Event][start_time][hour], data[Event][start_time][minute], 
# data[Event][start_time][meridian]
# 
<div class="input datetime required">
  <?php echo $this->Form->input( 'Event.start_time.date', array( 'type' => 'text', 'label' => 'Start Time', 'div' => false, 'class' => 'date' ) ) ?>
  <?php echo $this->Form->input( 'Event.start_time', array( 'type' => 'time', 'label' => false, 'div' => false, 'class' => 'time', 'empty' => true ) ) ?>
</div>

# 
# In my model (/models/event.php)
# 
function deconstruct( $field, $data ) {
  $type = $this->getColumnType( $field );

  if( in_array( $type, array( 'datetime', 'timestamp' ) ) ) {
    if( isset( $data['date'] ) && !empty( $data['date'] ) ) {
      $date = date( 'U', strtotime( $data['date'] ) );

      if( $date ) {
        $data['month'] = date( 'm', $date );
        $data['day']   = date( 'd', $date );
        $data['year']  = date( 'Y', $date );
      }
    }
  }

  # Now the date is broken down into components that the
  # well-vetted parent method expects. Let it do the heavy 
  # lifting.
  return parent::deconstruct( $field, $data );
}

For clarity, I've excluded the javascript code that creates the picker itself. It's a simply jQuery UI behavior applied to the data[Event][start_time][date] field and isn't germane to the solution. Suffice to say, when the date textbox receives the focus a very pretty calendar appears.

In my case, I also have several models that have datetime properties so I ended up moving the deconstruct() override out to a my AppModel so I can use it throughout. DRY.