Overriding Date#to_s

Rails
1

Hi everyone.

I just ran into an issue which I solved in an…er…interesting way,
and I’m trying to figure out if my solution is brilliant or terrible.

Basically, I have a Date attribute in one of my AR models which I would
like my views to display with a particular format (other than what
Date#to_s gives). Rather than have to call a formatting method on this
attribute every time I use it in a view, what I have done is to override
the to_s method on the object’s singleton class.

Does this make sense? Is there a better way to handle date formatting
in Rails?

Best,

Marnen Laibow-Koser
http://www.marnen.org
[email protected]

2

On Thu, Jan 21, 2010 at 7:34 PM, Marnen Laibow-Koser
[email protected] wrote:

Does this make sense? Â Is there a better way to handle date formatting
in Rails?

There is a way to specify different date formats in rails, checkout
the “Adding your own time formats to to_formatted_s” section of the
API.

http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveSupport/CoreExtensions/Date/Conversions.html

3

Christos Trochalakis wrote:

On Thu, Jan 21, 2010 at 7:34 PM, Marnen Laibow-Koser
[email protected] wrote:

Does this make sense? Â Is there a better way to handle date formatting
in Rails?

There is a way to specify different date formats in rails, checkout
the “Adding your own time formats to to_formatted_s” section of the
API.

http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveSupport/CoreExtensions/Date/Conversions.html

Thanks! I thought Rails had something like this, but I was looking in
the wrong place. Duhhh.

Best,

Marnen Laibow-Koser
http://www.marnen.org
[email protected]