Date handling - Carbon and formatting

Hey Prez. The thing is I'm not calling that createFromFormat() function directly, it's being called through the Laravel framework when I do the ->toArray() call in the Form. I suppose if I set $format = Y-m-d H:i:s it will work, but I wanted to use the d-m-Y format.

@dezgo What is the Column type in the database?

fyi, you only NEED to any dates not included with timestamps().

protected $dates = ['invoice_date', 'due_date'];

when displaying dates from the db:

$model->invoice_date->toDateString();       // YYYY-MM-DD
$model->invoice_date->toFormattedDateString(); //Dec 25, 1975

To accept the date from a form and put into database:

Carbon::createFromFormat('Y-m-d',  $val); // Notice the capital Y not lowercase and the position of each is important. Your code above has it backwards.

Use HTML instead of form helpers... much faster and simpler. Why toArray(), the form model should accept an object not an array as far as I remember (l4.0 was last time i touched form helpers).

@jekinney Column type is datetime. And yep good pickup on the $dates, I noticed that today.

The thing is I'm using form-model binding so didn't want to override that and explicitly specify the field value. The Form helper accepts an array or object. When using an array it'll then convert the date based on that dateFormat field.

But I couldn't get that working, so I'm currently using Carbon's setToStringFormat function as per balping's answer at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/31735594/laravel-dates-on-form-model-binding/31737184#31737184 before showing any form with a date on it. Not ideal.

Your suggestions are good, I think I might have to forget about using the form-model binding though to use them.

I'm not really sure what you are trying to do here, but if your data is already a carbon instance (as stored in the DB), than there is no need to use createFromFormat, instead use your $dateFormat variable to display it in the way you want like:

$data->created_at->format($dateFormat);

Accessors and mutators will handle the conversion to and from a specific format for display and settings to database

There seems to be way too much work going on here?

I just create a dateTime column in the database - (this does not store in 'carbon format')

then create an accessor that converts the dateTime field into a Carbon instance ( I guess this is what adding it to the $dates field does)

in any view or elsewhere then just know that the field is a carbon object and use it directly or apply formatting for the situation.

Thanks @Snapey . I agree this should be simple. I'm just wanting to do that standard use-case. Store in db as a date, manipulate it in the model as a Carbon instance, and display it to the user as a formatted date, preferably in the format d-m-Y.

The issue is with the form-model binding, it's automatically populated, you don't manually specify the field so there's no opportunity to format it. I thought that's where the $dateFormat protected variable came into it.

I'm now unsure how to use that $dateFormat property. The code says this:

/**
 * The storage format of the model's date columns.
 *
 * @var string
 */
protected $dateFormat;

So maybe that variable has nothing to do with presentation?

I've never tried to use it to return a default format, I only consider its use for interpretation of dates passed to the model.

In the Form class, when you specify the date field, can you not add the formatting there? How are you handling the date on the form, is it just a html5 native date picker?

Form::date('due_date',$model->due_date->format('d-M-Y'));

I've not used form for a few years so I'm not sure exactly.