rails dates with json

Question

I am implementing a Facebook application and using AJAX/JSON.

However the JSON structures that are returned have this format 2010-05

Answer 1

Definitely easier to do it on the server side. You can do a gsub regex to put it into the format you want, or a time.strftime, then generating your json with that string.

Answer 2

Rails now has the .as_json method on the DateTime object. Life made easier.

Answer 3

If you want to do this with client-side javascript, you can parse individual dates with something like this:

prettyDate = function(dateString) {
  var day, formatted, jsDate, month;

  jsDate = new Date(dateString);
  day = jsDate.getMonth() + 1 < 10 ? "0" + (jsDate.getMonth() + 1) : "" + (jsDate.getMonth() + 1);
  month = jsDate.getDate() < 10 ? "0" + (jsDate.getDate()) : "" + (jsDate.getDate());

  formatted = "" + day + "/" + month + "/" + (jsDate.getFullYear());
  return formatted;
};

You'll need some additional code if your needing to format time of course.

Answer 4

You can override method as_json in your model as:

class Game
  def as_json(options = {})
    super.merge(time: time.strftime('%d.%m.%Y %H:%M:%S'))
  end
end

Answer 5

With timezone working in all major browsers and ie7+:

class ActiveSupport::TimeWithZone
  def as_json(options = {})
    strftime('%Y/%m/%d %H:%M:%S %z')
  end
end

Answer 6

Time.parse < datetime >

simples.