Administrate: Datetime Picker Frequently Shows Incorrect Time for `Field::Time`

[conradbeach]

The Issue

Frequently, the datetime picker in Administrate displays the incorrect value in form fields displaying Field::Times.

This issue can be demonstrated in the example application by changing the type of the published_at attribute in the PostDashboard from published_at: Field::DateTimeto published_at: Field::Time.

You can then observe the following behavior after creating a new Post.

1. The value for published_at for the Post is displayed as 11:45AM in both index and show views.
   
   

2. When you click the edit button, you are taken to the edit form for the Post and the published_at time is incorrectly displayed as 20:45:00.
   

3. If you click save without making any modifications to the form, the Post is updated with the incorrect published_at time.
   

4. If you click the edit button again, the correct value for published_at is displayed in the form.
   

Different times behave differently. Some are displayed correctly, some are not.

This behavior is the same whether the database column is of type time or datetime.

I observed this behavior with and without timezones.

I haven't observed this behavior with Field::DateTimes.

My Investigation & Analysis

Administrate makes use of the bootstrap-datetimepicker library to add a datepicker to datetime fields in forms. That library in turn depends on Moment.js for parsing dates and times. Administrate uses bootstrap-datetimepicker via the datetime_picker_rails gem.

The file responsible for rendering Field::Time form fields is app/views/fields/time/_form.html.erb. It renders an <input type="text"> field. If you're editing an existing value, the partial doesn't use a valid datetime format for the value of that field though. It uses a datetime of the following format: 2000-01-01 20:45:00 UTC (or perhaps 1999-12-31 17:45:00 -0800 if you're using timezones).
So you end up with a text input that looks like this:
<input data-type="time" type="text" value="2000-01-01 20:45:00 UTC" name="blog_post[published_at]" id="blog_post_published_at">

If you try to parse that datetime string using Moment.js, you get a warning along the lines of Deprecation warning: value provided is not in a recognized RFC2822 or ISO format. moment construction falls back to js Date(), which is not reliable across all browsers and versions.

So my first inclination was to think that properly formatting the datetime might fix the issue. This can be done pretty easily by changing a line in the app/views/fields/time/_form.html.erb partial from:
<%= f.text_field field.attribute, data: { type: 'time' } %>
to:
<%= f.text_field field.attribute, data: { type: 'time' }, value: field.data.iso8601 %>

This results in a text field that looks like this:
<input data-type="time" value="2000-01-01T20:45:00Z" type="text" name="blog_post[published_at]" id="blog_post_published_at">

This, however, didn't fix the buggy behavior. Even with a valid ISO8601 datetime string, the form field still frequently shows the incorrect time.

If you disable JavaScript, the correct time is displayed in the form field. If you turn JS back on, the time is displayed incorrectly. This leads me to believe that bootstrap-datetimepicker is parsing or rendering the time incorrectly. I don't think it's an issue within Administrate.

I'd like to submit a pull request to address this, but since datetime_picker_rails is no longer maintained, I'm not sure if there's a way for me to do that.

[noefroidevaux]

@conradbeach I have the same problem.

It seems that administrate do the time parsing with the format option "HH:mm:ss":

https://github.com/thoughtbot/administrate/blob/32b3cfc6b5e9183fa052e40bf523000d1edf06dd/app/assets/javascripts/administrate/components/date_time_picker.js#L4

So if I use the same format in the _form.html.erb, it works:

  <%= f.text_field field.attribute, data: { type: 'time' }, value: l(field.data, format: '%H:%M:%S') %>

But I'm not sure if it's the "right" solution.

[conradbeach]

@noefroidevaux Thanks for the suggestion.

[leandrocastro]

The same thing happening here, but the change is a little more serious:

On edit:

[aksharj]

hi, can anyone please share fix for this, in my case the datetime in not stored in UTC, its stored in user local time while created _at and updated_at get saved as UTC

[pablobm]

@leandrocastro, @aksharj: which version of Administrate are you using? Recently there was a change to how the form is rendered. Perhaps it'll fix your issue?

Otherwise, could you please let me know which DB software you are using, and which column types are your affected fields (DB types, not Rails types)? I wonder if this might be related.