Rails - Sep 2005 - Date validation again - code that consolidates dates?

Where in Rails would I find the code that deals with consolidating the various 
elements of a group of date/time selection boxes back into one datetime 
value?  For example, from a datetime_select or select_date.

I need to alter how it works to make it throw up an error on invalid dates 
(31st September, 30th February etc.) and although I now have a neat way of 
doing this for one case where I''m handling dates myself (not saving
them
directly into the database), I don''t quite know where to tackle this
problem
for the stuff that ActiveRecord takes care of.

I really need my dates to be checked to make sure they are valid.  Just out of 
interest, is there a technical reason why RoR will roll over invalid dates to 
the next valid date, so September 31st becomes October 1st?  It would be nice 
if there were a "strict" option to raise an error when an invalid date
was
entered, and I''m wondering if I might be able to write that and submit
it as
a patch?  If not, I certainly need to set it up for my own uses, so, if 
someone could point me in the right direction for where to find those 
functions, and possibly about how to side-step around them or override their 
workings, that''d be great.

I''ve tried grepping in my /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems but
can''t find many
instances of mktime except for some test code... and I''m not sure what
else
it could be done using?  Perhaps it''s not ActiveRecord that handles
this, but
I thought it would be?

Surely I''m not the only person for whom this acceptance of invalid
dates
causes problems?  Even something like a validates_date check would be good - 
perhaps that''s the easiest answer?  However, it would seem that the
problem
there is that the field is split into separate parts, then automatically 
consolidated, and only made available for validation after that... as far as 
I can tell?  How do we validate it (in as non-kludgy a way as possible) 
before it gets that far?  Any suggestions?

I Googled "rails validate_date" and found this Typo patch, but even
that seems
to just roll the invalid dates over, rather than complain about them:
http://typo.leetsoft.com/trac/attachment/ticket/13/calender.patch

By the way, thanks to Tom Davies for his little days_in(year, month) function 
that solved at least one part of my date validation stuff for me before, and 
saved me having to write that for myself - good stuff!  I just need to take 
this further and get it working on the ActiveRecord-handled dates.

Cheers,

~Dave

-- 

Dave Silvester
Rent-A-Monkey Website Development
Web: http://www.rentamonkey.com/

On Thursday 29 Sep 2005 18:32, Dave Silvester wrote:
> Surely I''m not the only person for whom this acceptance of invalid
dates
> causes problems?
... but perhaps I am after all?

Is there a pragmatic and sound reason for accepting and rolling-over invalid 
dates, rather than raising an error?  Are others not bothered for a good 
reason?  What do you tell your customers who want enforcement of valid dates 
when giving them a Rails app that just swallows them, rolls them over to the 
next day and doesn''t complain?

Honestly, I can''t believe I''m the only one this causes a
problem for?  Surely
others must need proper date validation built in to Rails!  Surely?

Please would someone enlighten me?  :-)

~Dave

-- 

Dave Silvester
Rent-A-Monkey Website Development
Web: http://www.rentamonkey.com/

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On Sep 30, 2005, at 1:25 PM, Dave Silvester wrote:
> On Thursday 29 Sep 2005 18:32, Dave Silvester wrote:
>> Surely I''m not the only person for whom this acceptance of
invalid
>> dates
>> causes problems?
>
> ... but perhaps I am after all?
>
> Is there a pragmatic and sound reason for accepting and rolling- 
> over invalid
> dates, rather than raising an error?  Are others not bothered for a  
> good
> reason?  What do you tell your customers who want enforcement of  
> valid dates
> when giving them a Rails app that just swallows them, rolls them  
> over to the
> next day and doesn''t complain?
>
> Honestly, I can''t believe I''m the only one this causes a
problem
> for?  Surely
> others must need proper date validation built in to Rails!  Surely?
>
> Please would someone enlighten me?  :-)
Try using a DATE column instead of TIMESTAMP or DATETIME.

DATE maps to Ruby''s Date but the others map to Ruby''s Time. 
Date
raises an exception on invalid dates; Rails catches it and sets the  
date to nil.  Time, however, only raises an exception if a basic  
range check fails, then tries its damnedest to make sense of the  
params its given.  See the insance search_time_t in time.c -- wow.

For correct behavior, we should consider switching from Time to  
DateTime, at least for parsing.

 >> require ''time''
=> true
 >> Time.parse "Fri Sep 31 14:28:58 PDT 2005"
=> Sat Oct 01 14:28:58 PDT 2005
 >> require ''date''
=> true
 >> DateTime.parse "Fri Sep 31 14:28:58 PDT 2005"
ArgumentError: invalid date
         from /usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/date.rb:1173:in `civil''
         from /usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/date.rb:1216:in `new_with_hash''
         from /usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/date.rb:1258:in `parse''
         from (irb):4

Best,
jeremy
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