Calendar Date Select: A Lightweight, Prototype-based Date/Time Picker for Rails Developers
Post by Peter Cooper
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Calendar Date Select is a new(ish) "date and time picker", developed by Tim Harper, designed primarily for developers to use in Rails applications. It uses the standard Prototype JavaScript library, and is easily installed as a Rails plugin:
script/plugin install http://calendardateselect.googlecode.com/svn/tags/calendar_date_select
Take a look at the collection of demos of the picker to see its full range.
August 7th, 2007 at 7:26 pm
Looks useful to me, why is it actually ment to be used with Rails? It’s just javascrip, right?
August 7th, 2007 at 8:43 pm
Kudos! It’s about freakin’ time someone created a Rails plugin, seeing as how there are so many standalone ones available. There’s one that requires rails engines, but I’ve been trying to avoid that….
August 8th, 2007 at 4:57 am
I’m currently using it for my site - works pretty well so far
August 8th, 2007 at 11:56 pm
Matthijs,
There’s a lot of people who use CalendarDateSelect just for the JavaScript component alone, and are having success with it.
You can checkout the latest version of the JavaScript / css here:
http://calendardateselect.googlecode.com/svn/tags/calendar_date_select/public/
August 10th, 2007 at 6:47 am
Very cool :-)
August 10th, 2007 at 7:21 am
Chris Petersen at the Assay Depot posted ActiveCalendar a while back that does a very similar thing. I haven’t had a chance to dig under the hood with your plugin but it is great to have some more options! Thanks!
fyi - Active Calendar is at http://developer.assaydepot.com/?p=5
August 10th, 2007 at 8:32 pm
ActiveCalendar is a great rails plugin. It’s the underlying JavaScript code which is the fundamental difference between CalendarDateSelect and ActiveCalendar. The Dynarch Calendar JavaScript (ActiveCalendar) code has quite a few more features than CalendarDateSelect’s prototype-based date picker. However, Dynarch also comes with it’s own proprietary framework and is almost 5 times the size of CalendarDateSelect’s CSS+JS code!
If you are already using prototype, and you really only need a flexible Calendar Date Picker with the options of picking times, and running lightweight is important to you, Calendar Date Select is likely a perfect fit.
However, if you value features like semantics, being able to drag the calendar, etc. and size/”page loading” speed is not important to you, Dynarch’s calendar (ActiveCalendar) is a fantastic solution.
The project’s home page has a link to ActiveCalendar (along with many other date pickers), with a comparison chart of features/size.
Tim