New entry in table for each date between two dates?

I'm having trouble wrapping my head around something I'm trying to do...

Basically I'm trying to build a reservations system. I have my form populating the reservations table with the information I need, but also upon creating a new reservation I need it to also populate a bookingstatus table. What I'm trying to figure out right now is how to create the code in the controller to take my checkindate and checkoutdate and create entries in the bookingstatus table for those dates and each date in between. I know it'll be a loop of some sort, but I'm new to all this and can't wrap my head around it.

Any guidance on what this controller code will look like?

Much appreciated!

First, creating booking statuses for every day between two dates sounds like business logic to me; thus, I’d put the behavior for it in the BookingStatus model instead of the controller.

That said, how about making the method take a range of dates. Then, you could iterate the range, creating a record for each one.

class BookingStatus < ActiveRecord::Base

class << self

def fill(date_range)
  date_range.each do |date|
    create(:date => date, ...) # with other attributes as required

  end
end

end

end

I’d try to pick better names for the method and its parameter, but I hope that sparks some ideas.

Regards, Craig

That makes sense except I may need just a little more hand holding with the date_range part. In my view I have two text fields: one for start_date and one for end_date. How do take those two dates and make them work for the code above? In other words how do those two dates become date_range so that they can be looped through? Thanks so much!

I’m sure there are as many ways to do it as there are members of this list! :slight_smile:

I’m not far enough along in my Rails experience to know which way to choose and why, but here are a couple of ideas that spring to mind.

To convert your strings to dates, you could do “1/14/2008”.to_date, or you could do Date.parse(“1/14/2008”). Note that using a four-digit year is recommended for those two approaches; otherwise, you end up with a date whose year is 0008. If you need to support more flexible date/time parsing, I would recommend looking at Chronic [ http://chronic.rubyforge.org/].

Once you have the two dates you can just create a range, e.g.,

date_range = (first_date…second_date)

If you haven’t already, you can try these things in IRB or the console for your Rails app.

I’d highly recommend spending as much time as you can learning Ruby. The more I learn it, the easier working with Rails becomes. Just find something that interests you, such as ranges (of integers, dates, etc.) and play with them in IRB or the Rails console. Or, write unit tests or specs (using RSpec [http://rspec.info]) to gain a feel for how they work. If you like, I could share a few that I wrote.

Regards, Craig