We have a couple of straight-up date fields in our app. When the form renders I’d like to to have the value to be in mm/dd/yy format. I’ve tried setting it up with i18n, and others, but I can’t find the right way to do it in Rails 3. Stack Overflow is all over the place with the ‘right’ way to do it.
The best ‘right’ way to do it is to use localization to handle it. For instance
# config/locales/en.yml
en:
date:
formats:
default: "%m-%d-%Y"
There’s similar settings for time. See the default rails i18n files
With this in place you’ll need to call localize(date_field) from your views. localize can be shortened to l if you would like, or you can wrap this in a helper method, say datestamp, in application_helper.rb if that suits you.
Gotcha, so in my form fields, I’ll still have to put a :value in there. I was hoping to get away from that part. I could write a helper to build it I guess, but it seems there should be another way.
@jarrettgreen If you’re using a form builder (formtastic or simple_form) you can override the date type, or make a new type which represents the date in the format you’d like.
Ahhhh. I AM using simple_form. Good idea, I’ll take a look.