Determining the member type in Params Hash

Rails
1

Is there an easy way to determine what is the “type” of a member in the
Params hash? The reason that I ask this question is that I have to make
adjustments for UK dates in the params hash for date and datetime
fields.

The date and datetime fields are being returned as Strings. So when I
assign the hash to an instance variable’s attributes as follows:

@entry.attributes = params[:entry]

for example. The program errors out. I have to Normalize the String
representation of UK dates in in US dates (still String format) before
the

lvar = params[:entry]
unless lvar[:example_date].nil?
  lvar[:date] = ParseDate.normalize_date(lvar[:example_date])
end
@entry.attributes = lvar

statement is executed and then everything works fine. But this is a lot
of ugly duplicate coding accounting for specific members of params hash
that are date and datetime type. I was hoping that there might be an
elegant solution to this problem.
Thanks in advance for your time.
Bharat

2

Although my Rails-fu is only of moderate strength…

The only thing determining the expected type of a particular params hash
value (they are all strings as you said) is the intended receiver…
which sounds like a model to me (@entry)… which would make the
translation from UK to US the model’s business… which would lead me to
create a model method to employ between the params hash and the model
assignment

@entry = Entry.new.localized ‘US’, params[:entry]

or something like that.

The localized method could check just the params attributes necessary
(Entry knows which attributes it has to check, other models know their
attributes), and the code that actually does the normalization per
attribute might go in a helper, a module, or as part of a superclass
between AR and Entry depending on how often it was used.

Fred probably has a better way though… :wink:

3

Thanks Ar for your response. If someone can add a bit more clarity to
this then I can run with it. Fred? Anyone?