I'm looking for something that given a date, will display the time from now in words. Example:
if today is 4/28/2012, I want:
4/29 to display "Tomorrow"
4/30 to display "Next Monday"
4/31 to display "Next Tuesday"
Is there a gem for this already or do I have to write it myself? If I have to write it what's the cleanest way to do it? I haven't written anything like this before in rails. Thanks!
I believe you're looking for the distance_of_time_in_words helper, which is already available in Rails - it's basically the opposite of time_ago_in_words, in the sense that it tells you the amount of time between two times, as opposed to how long since a certain time has passed vs now, and can therefore be used to measure into the future instead of into the past.
It won't give you days of the week like "Next monday", but if you click the Source: show link at the bottom of the helper's documentation, it will provide you the code you'd need to create a modified version of the helper that could display the day of week information pretty easily. Combine that with the code in this answer regarding calculating the day of the week, and you're pretty much done.
Related
I'm building a spreadsheet that automatically gets a row added when I get an application on my form. Here is the link to the sheet. As you can see, the first tab is just a list of applications, with the location they've applied for, and the date. The second tab is a daily count for each location, which is eventually sent out as an email each night. I'd like to include weekly numbers, and maybe even an ongoing weekly comparison. e.g. # of apps today, this week (so far), last week, etc.
I'm no expert with this stuff and it's getting a bit over my head possibly. Any ideas on how to get this done smoothly?? Thanks a ton in advance!
Your problem (like many) is primarily a problem with the organization of your raw data.
On a new tab called MK.Help, I've put the following formula in cell A2:
=ARRAYFORMULA(QUERY(SPLIT(FLATTEN(Applications!A2:A&"|"&Applications!S2:S&"|"&FLOOR(Applications!S2:S-2,7)+2&"|"&Applications!B2:R),"|",0,0),"where Col4 is not null and Col2>="&I2))
Then I made a simple table on the right with some fairly straightforward COUNTIFS() that look like this:
=COUNTIFS($C:$C,H$2,$D:$D,$F3)
The layout of the data vertically is what's making the formulas relatively simple for the summary.
I'm using Rails 4, and also Twitter Bootstrap.
I'd like to select the date with a date picker, but have a separately visible component for selecting the hour and minutes.
I've had a look at smalot bootstrap-datetimepicker https://github.com/smalot/bootstrap-datetimepicker , but looking at the Demo Page, they don't demonstrate any ability to show date and time separately. You have to choose date, and then later on choose time, which doesn't feel very intuitive.
I've also looked at Eonasdan bootstrap-datetimepicker https://github.com/Eonasdan/bootstrap-datetimepicker , but the time picking for it, even in inline mode, is not intuitive - will people know they can just click on the hour value to change it?
I'm thinking of just using a date picker for picking the date, and selecting the hour and minute myself, but it kind of feels wrong handing off part of a datetime to a gem/library and handling the rest of it myself.
I came across Separate date and time form fields in Rails , which is asking about this kind of problem, but it's a question from September 2010.
How do I select the date with a date picker, but have simple and immediately visible selection of time?
First, unless you find a plugin that does what you want off the rack, then yes, it's up to you to handle it, and yes, it feels kinda wrong - depending on how you do it.
Not sure what you had in mind, but the way it feels "the most wrong" is if your form has a single "date time" field under the hood, and you use javascript to botch together the date from the plugin and the time from your own setup, and store them in your datetime field. The nice thing about this is your rails app just gets a single datetime field and knows exactly what to do with it.
Here's how I'd approach it:
Keeping in mind that forms don't necessarily have to map 1-to-1 with your models, I'd split it in the controller layer, and conceptually think of "a form with two fields: date, and time", and then in your controller (or a form object, which is probably better for this situation) you'd stitch the date and time together, before saving them to your model. This approach means you can have separate validation on each field, which is probably also what you want (because I'd assume it's possible for users to input a valid date, but an invalid time or vica versa).
In terms of handling the date with a plugin and the time yourself, that's now fine - they're two completely separate fields from the perspective of your form, so there's nothing dirty about it. It just means you need the extra logic in your controller layer to split the datetime when you display the form, and merge the date and time back into one when you save the form.
Edit: if you haven't heard of form objects, check out https://github.com/apotonick/reform and http://railscasts.com/episodes/416-form-objects
I want to allow teachers to be able to login to my Rails 3.2 app and be able to set when they are available. So instead of having two datetime fields where an actual date is stored is stored for starts_at and ends_at, I'd like for them just to say I'm available on "Mondays between 4:00pm and 5:00pm" with all three values being dropdowns.
The orignal way I approached this was having a string for day and using the time_select method in my form for my starts_at and ends_at. Unfortunately, time_select still comes with the date.
I'm just looking for the cleanest way to allow weekly scheduling. Is this possible? If it is, is there an easier way to do this? Thanks in advance for your tips.
take a look at
https://github.com/mzararagoza/rails-fullcalendar-icecube
its a small appointment app that i think that you can take allot out of it.
hi im new in ruby on rails
here is my scenario i have two timers time_star and time_end
im just wondering if there is a validator or helper that will change the time of the end time based on the time of the start time in order not to get a negative value upon getting the difference of the two time it is yes possible in jquery but i want to know if rails can also do this
example if i choose 1pm on time_start then time_end will only show 2pm onwards
im also researching it now im just hopping there may be many possible answer here
You can use two different approaches to achieve different goals.
You can write custom validator to prevent time_end that lower than time_start to be stored to the database. Or you can pay attention on standart numericality validator, maybe it will be enough for you.
You can write some helpers, JS or other view related code to allow user choose time_end value only greater than time_start in the html widget.
In my opinion, it's quite a specific task and unlikely you will find something in rails for it, but it can be realized in a few lines of code according to your wishes.
What I want to do is very simple but I'm trying to find the best or most elegant way to do this. The Rails application I'm building now will have a schedule of daily classes. For each class the fields relevant to this question are:
Day of the week
Starting time
Ending time
A single entry could be something such as:
day of week: Wednesday
starting time: 10:00 am
ending time: Noon
Also I must mention that it's a bi-lingual Rails 2.2 app and I'm using the native i18n Rails feature. I actually have several questions.
Regarding the day of the week, should I create an extra table with list of days, or is there a built-in way to create that list on the fly? Keep in mind these days of the week will have to be rendered in English or Spanish in the schedule view depending on the locale variable.
While querying the schedule I will need to group and order the results by weekday, from Monday to Sunday, and of course order the classes within each day by starting time.
Regarding the starting time and ending time of each class would you use datetime fields or integer fields? If the latter how would you implement this exactly?
Looking forward to read the different suggestions you guys will come up with.
I would just store the day of the week as an integer. 0 => Monday ... 6 => Sunday (or any way you want. ie. 0 => Sunday). Then store the start time and end time as Time.
That would make grouping really easy. All you would have to do is sort by the day of the week and the start time.
You can display this in multiple ways, but here is what I would do.
Have functions like: #sunday_classes = DailyClass.find_sunday_classes that returns all the classes for Sunday sorted by start time. Then repeat for each day.
def find_sunday_classes
find_by_day_of_week(1, :order -> 'start_time')
end
Note: find_by probably should have id at the end but that's just preference in how you want to name the column.
If you want the full week then call all seven from the controller and loop trough them in the view. You could even create detail pages for each day.
Translation is the only tricky part. You can create a helper function that takes an integer and returns the text for the appropriate day of the week based on local.
That's very basic. Nothing complicated.
If your data is a Time then I would store that as a Time - otherwise you will always have to convert it out of the database when you do date and time related operations on it. The day is redundant data, as it will be part of the time object.
This should mean that you don't need to store a list of days.
If t is a time then
t.strftime('%A')
will always give you the day as a string in English. This could then be translated by i18n as required.
So you only need to store starting time and ending time, or starting time and duration. Both should be equivalent. I would be tempted to store ending time myself, in case you need to do data manipulations on ending times, which therefore won't have to be calculated.
I think most of the rest of what you describe should also fall out of storing time data as instances of Time.
Ordering by week day and time will just be a matter of ordering by your time column. i.e.
daily_class.find(:all, :conditions => ['whatever'], :order => :starting_time)
Grouping by day is a little more tricky. However this is an excellent post on how to group by week. Grouping by day will be analogous.
If you are dealing with non-trivial volumes of data, it may be better to do it in the database, with a find_by_sql and that may depend on your database's time and date functionality, but again storing the data as a Time will also help you here. For example in Postgresql (which I use), getting the week of a class is
date_trunc('week', starting_time)
which you can use in a Group By clause, or as a value to use in some loop logic in rails.
Re days-of-week, if you need to have e.g. classes that meet 09:00-10:00 on MWF, then you could either use a separate table for days a class meets (keyed by both class ID and DOW) or be evil (i.e. non-normalized) and keep the equivalent of an array of DOW in each class. The classic argument is this:
The separate table can be indexed in a way to support either class-oriented or DOW-oriented selects, but takes a bit more glue to put the entire picture together for a class.
The array-of-DOW is simpler to visualize for beginning programmers and slightly simpler to code about, but means that reasoning about DOW requires looking at all classes.
If this is only for your personal class schedule, do what gets you the value you're looking for, and live with the consequences; if you're trying to build a real system for multiple users, I'd go with a separate table. All those normalization rules are there for a reason.
As far as (human-readable) DOW names, that's a presentation-layer issue, and shouldn't be in the core concept of DOW. (Suppose you decided to move to Montreal, and needed French? That should be another "face" and not a change to the core implementation.)
As for starting/ending times, again the issue is your requirements. If all classes begin and end at hour (x:00) boundaries, you could certainly use 0..23 as the hours of the day. But then your life would be miserable as soon as you had to accommodate that 45-minute seminar. As the old commercial said, "Pay me now or pay me later."
One approach would be to define your own ClassTime concept and partition all reasoning about times to that class. It could start with a simplistic representation (integral hours 0..23, or integral minutes after midnight 0..1439) and then "grow" as needed.