MultiParameters

[ismaelga]

Is there any way to accept multi parameters for example for date and time?

I haven't read anything about it so I suppose not. If so what do you guys think about adding this as a plugin gem? I have an idea how to implement it but I'm not sure if it will work because I haven't seen much on virtus internals

[dkubb]

@ismaelga can you be more specific about what you're looking for? I think your request could be interpreted several ways, and I want us to be more clear before discussing too deeply.

[ismaelga]

Uh. Sorry. What I mean with multi params is when there are many fields in a form that correspond to an attribute. In rails this feature lives in activerecord. I would use this feature to on a Form Object. Currently I can do this using a tableless model but I want to use Virtus so my class does not get polluted by activerecord but this feature is lacking.

Here is an example of the form fields I'm talking about.

<input type="text" name="something(1i)" />
  <input type="text" name="something(2s)" />
  <input type="text" name="something(3f)" />

[solnic]

@ismaelga virtus supports coercing hash to date/datetime/time

EDIT: here's an example:

User = Class.new { include Virtus }
User.attribute :bday, Date
User.new :bday => { :year => 1983, :month => 11, :day => 18  }
 => #<User:0x007fac89aa0860 @bday=#<Date: 1983-11-18 ((2445657j,0s,0n),+0s,2299161j)>>

[ismaelga]

@solnic Yes I know that but this is a little different. What you get from params when using Time input is something like this:

{
  "start_time(1i)"=>"2013", # year
  "start_time(2i)"=>"3", # month
  "start_time(3i)"=>"29", # day
  "start_time(4i)"=>"18", # hour
  "start_time(5i)"=>"00" # minutes
}

What do you guys use for Time inputs if you don't need this feature?

PS: DataMapper has this feature http://www.ruby-doc.org/gems/docs/d/dm-rails-1.2.1/Rails/DataMapper/MultiparameterAttributes.html

[solnic]

@ismaelga I don't have this use case. I'd use a hash like I showed in the example.

[solnic]

closing this one sine this feature isn't needed in virtus

[marcgg]

For what it's worth, I'd love to have this feature as well, mainly because Rails date select helper will send data formatted like @ismaelga explained.

[solnic]

A lot of people need functionality that's required by rails - my suggestion is to create virtus-rails with all that stuff. I don't want to have anything rails-specific in main virtus project.

[marcgg]

That makes a lot of sense, especially if you don't use Rails yourself.

If the need for such a thing increases in my company, I'll see what I can do. For now the way virtus behaves is already great. Of course it would have been a nice thing to have, but the gem is perfectly usable without it :)

[solnic]

OK cool! :)

[mbj]

@solnic Morpher could handle these representation mappings. Quite well.

[dgilperez]

@ismaelga how did you eventually approached this?

[ismaelga]

@dgilperez I can't remember but I probably changed the form input to get a string instead.

[maxshelley]

@dgilperez I just came across this after needing the same thing. How did you handle this? I wrote a little re-former class, https://gist.github.com/maxshelley/6581d8a3897e81493d39, but I'm not sure this was the best way to deal with this. Would love to hear if you found anything better?

[ismaelga]

@maxshelley you might want to have a look at https://github.com/datamapper/dm-rails/blob/master/lib/dm-rails/multiparameter_attributes.rb

You will also find a lot of discussion about this feature googling for MultiparameterAttributes

[joost]

Thanks @ismaelga. This gist (Google result #1) did the trick for me: https://gist.github.com/sj26/767b29f11fed8a4d13c5

[sj26]

I've release a gem based on that gist here:

https://github.com/sj26/virtus-multiparams