Working with and testing dates in rails

Question

My application uses dates a lot. A lot of ajax calls and urls involve datetimes and I find the typical format '1920-10-10 18:30:00' to be unfriendly for these purposes. I work around this by creating a helper method that basically strips the unnecessary characters out of the date (192010101830) and another method for converting the string back in to a date object.

When I build a url it goes something like this:

=link_to "Send Date", thing_my_date_path(date_to_string(DateTime.now))

Then when the thing_date action receives, it converts the parameter back in to a datetime object

def my_date
  @date = string_to_date(params[:mydate])
  ....
end

This works fine in development. However I am completely open to other suggestions.

The problem is when I go to test my application. Tests fail because the helper methods for date_to_string and string_to_date are not present. I could include them in the tests but I feel like they should be kept separate.

So I'm looking for
a) a better way to pass dates around, and more importantly

b) a method of testing an action that is dependent on helper methods.

radixhound · Accepted Answer · 2011-04-29 23:31:33Z

3

There are built-in methods for that methinks.

> DateTime.now.to_s(:number)
=> "20110429162748" 
> DateTime.parse("20110429162748")
=> Fri, 29 Apr 2011 16:27:48 +0000

Hope that helps..

answered Apr 29, 2011 at 23:31

radixhound

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1 Comment

recursive_acronym Over a year ago

This definitely helps my current situation, but I'm still having difficulty separating the helper methods from the controller tests.

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