Forum OpenACS Development: ad_form and dates

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1: ad_form and dates
Posted by Jon Griffin on 01/14/03 03:46 AM
It appears that ad_form (and even the templating system) don't play nice with dates.

I have just spent 4 hours trying to get the date widget to honor value and it just plain doesn't work. Of course I could be totally screwing something up, but in porting my code (which had the Michael Cleverly hacks) it all stops working.

I am going through the mess of date procs and it seems that the widget stuff wants a list. Has anyone else used the 4.6 templating system with dates as default values?

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2: Re: ad_form and dates (response to 1)
Posted by Don Baccus on 01/14/03 04:05 AM
I have, yes, and haven't forgotten your e-mail note.  I've been too busy to dig through your example to see why it isn't working.
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3: Re: ad_form and dates (response to 1)
Posted by Don Baccus on 01/14/03 04:08 AM
Ummm ... what might not work is arbitrary format strings for dates which was only partially implemented by aD.  When I fixed things so the minimal functionality worked I did not tackle that as implementing it involves writing a format-string driven date parser.

But I don't think offhand that the format you're using should cause a problem.

sqldate is the acquire-side thing you need to translate a date string to the date type's list format.  lineardate on the output side dumps the list as a string of space-delimited elements.

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4: Re: ad_form and dates (response to 1)
Posted by Tilmann Singer on 01/14/03 06:22 AM
Lacking the example code that seems to be buried in private email I can only state that in general it works for me, like this: 
if { [form is_request edit] } {
    db_1row get_times {
        select
        to_char(start_date, 'YYYY-MM-DD') as start_date,
        ...
    }

    element set_value edit start_date [util::date acquire clock [clock scan $start_date]]
}
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5: Re: ad_form and dates (response to 1)
Posted by Lars Pind on 01/14/03 10:10 AM
The value that you need to pass to the element has to be in this format:

YYYY MM DD HH24 MI

I think this is regardless of the format you're using for the widget.

Try that and see if that helps.

/Lars

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6: Re: ad_form and dates (response to 1)
Posted by Jon Griffin on 01/14/03 05:43 PM
Lars,
That didn't change anything. The value doesn't even show up.
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7: Re: ad_form and dates (response to 1)
Posted by Jon Griffin on 01/14/03 08:53 PM
After more experimentation (frustration).

Not using ad_form works with -value [util::date acquire clock [clock scan $start_date]]

If I use this in ad_form with {value {[util::date acquire clock [clock scan $start_date]]}} it doesn't work.

Lars suggestion also results in no default.

It appears that ad_form is the problem.

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8: Re: ad_form and dates (response to 1)
Posted by Ola Hansson on 01/14/03 09:39 PM
Jon, This works in ad_form for me: 
set all_widgets {}
lappend all_widgets \
	[list start_date:date {value {[util::date acquire clock [clock scan 2003-01-15]]}} optional]
ad_form -name spell \
    -mode edit \
    -cancel_url / \
    -cancel_label "Get outta here" \
    -confirm_template confirm \
    -spellcheck_template spellcheck \
    -spellcheck_label "Spell Away" \
    -form $all_widgets \
    -on_submit {

    # What now?

}
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9: Re: ad_form and dates (response to 1)
Posted by Jon Griffin on 01/14/03 11:55 PM
What version of ad_form are you using? It must be from the head because those switches aren't in 4.6.

Anyway it doesn't work for me.

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10: Re: ad_form and dates (response to 1)
Posted by Jon Griffin on 01/15/03 12:14 AM
OK, I did get it working. It seems that the linear_date is the problem. I will run some more tests and see if submits work properly (I think they do).
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11: Re: ad_form and dates (response to 1)
Posted by Don Baccus on 01/15/03 06:30 AM
Linear date is, I think, wrong on the acquire side.  The acquire side expects a string, corresponding to the "sql_date" ad_form translation name.

For all data types, "acquire" means "convert from Tcl string to internal format".  Linear date is the *internal* format which is a list.  Not quite the same as a Tcl string ...

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12: Re: ad_form and dates (response to 1)
Posted by Jon Griffin on 01/15/03 06:53 AM
I thought I tried sql_date, but I will try it again tommorrow.

Using the tcl clock technique seems to work fine also, so I am not sure that the whole sql_date/linear_date conversion thing is even necessary.

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13: Re: ad_form and dates (response to 1)
Posted by Jon Griffin on 01/16/03 09:55 PM
Don, sql_date works. Now which should be the official supported version. I will update my docs when this is decided.

Re: docs, I am going to attempt to document the whole ATS/Form api next week so if anyone has some comments or examples please send them off.

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14: Re: ad_form and dates (response to 1)
Posted by Jon Griffin on 01/24/03 03:15 AM
I am going through the templating and forms et al for new docs and have found several big errors in the parser.

For example: format "MONTH DD YYYY HH" shows up as:

March 9 2003 2003
Month Day Year Year
I will test all these and probably rewrite them using more extended masks.

Also, 2 date fields in a row causes many problems. So, off I go to rewrite the parser. Maybe I should just write it in yacc and be done with it ;)