Format date time in find operation in Rails 3

Question

I\'m looking for a way to format date time in find(:all) so that when I render my results in JSON, the date time will look like

\"March 20, 2011\"

instead of

Answer 1

Look you use jbuilder? and for example index.json.jbuilder

json.array!(@textstrings) do |textstring|
  json.extract! textstring, :id, :text
  json.created_at textstring.created_at.to_formatted_s(:short) 
  json.url textstring_url(textstring, format: :json)
end

in this example I am use method .to_formatted_s

 json.created_at textstring.created_at.to_formatted_s(:short

and i've got

[{"id":1,"text":"liveasda","created_at":"17 Nov 12:48","url":"http://localhost:5555/textstrings/1.json"},{"id":2,"text":"123","created_at":"17 Nov 14:26","url":"http://localhost:5555/textstrings/2.json"},

Answer 2

Time.now().strftime("%b %d, %Y)

Answer 3

That works (checked in Rails 3.1), put it into config/initializer/times_format.js. First two lines fix default time format (e.g. AR created_at). Third part is monkey patch for JSON.

Date::DATE_FORMATS[:default] = "%Y-%m-%d"
Time::DATE_FORMATS[:default] = "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S"

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

Answer 4

OK, so you want to render the results in JSON formatted nicely. Instead of changing the format of the date on the way in, change it on the way out.

class Post

  def formatted_created_at
    created_at.strftime("%b %d, %Y")
  end

  def as_json(args={})
    super(:methods=>:formatted_created_at, :except=>:date)
  end
end

Answer 5

I would have used Date.parse(datestring) on the client to generate some usable content.

Answer 6

Off the top of my head, you could do something like:

@posts = Post.all
@posts.all.each do |x|
  x.date = x.date.strftime("%b %d, %Y")
end
@posts.to_json