In ruby on rails Is there a way to dictate the format of fields inserted into the database via Activerecord?

Question

I'm inserting some strings (that look dates) into a sqlite3 database via my ActiveRecord and the database is altering the field and making it look like a date. For example:

"4-2" => "2-Apr"  #Not only a date but the order has been reversed.

"6-7-12" => "7/12/2006"  #Again not only a date but the order has been changed.

I looked for a ruby string function that would prevent this from happening but haven't been able to come up with anything.

Has anyone else come across something like this and are you aware of any workarounds or fixes.

Is the column that you are storing the strings in a date column? sqlite is going to try to coerce whatever string you send into a date. If you want to store the literals, you'll need to put them in a string column. — Marc Talbot, Feb 21 '12 at 14:53

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 21 '12 at 13:47

1

If you can predict the format of the string, use the following code to parse the string into date object before saving it.

Date.strptime '6-7-12', '%m-%d-%y'
=> Thu, 07 Jun 2012

answered Feb 21 '12 at 13:47

nkm

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But, I'm not looking for a date objects. I want a string. Perhaps I need to create a custom format. – Mutuelinvestor Feb 21 '12 at 17:54

In ruby on rails Is there a way to dictate the format of fields inserted into the database via Activerecord?

1 Answers1