Rails 4 strong parameters all of a sudden stopped working?

Question

Rails all of a sudden stopped picking up values that are entered with bootstrap-datpicker-rails , at least I've only noticed it with dates entered with it.

This is a binding.pry call

    16: def create
    17:   @batch = Batch.new(batch_params)
 => 18:   binding.pry
    19: 
    20:   if @batch.save
    21:     redirect_to :root
    22:   else
    23:     render 'new'
    24:   end
    25: end

[1] pry(#<BatchesController>)> params
=> {"utf8"=>"✓",
 "authenticity_token"=>"/0IzN2EfU7MHWnwLeL/RREsqo3C7vtintD8rbmW4rsbmGhV9Q8crc7DerCAnN+CDZ2Sf4OhSgM1aVl8sl3DLfQ==",
 "batch"=>{"name"=>"Batch3", "date"=>"02/14/2016"},
 "commit"=>"Create New Batch",
 "controller"=>"batches",
 "action"=>"create"}
[2] pry(#<BatchesController>)> @batch
=> #<Batch:0x007f99ca8b1120 id: nil, name: "Batch3", date: nil, created_at: nil, updated_at: nil, active: nil>

As you can see, parameter batch has valid date and name values but the @batch object only picks up the name and not the date. It was working an hour ago and the only thing I changed were some bootstrap elements for the UI.

My strong parameters:

  def batch_params
    params.require(:batch).permit(:name, :date)
  end

The form for entering the values:

<div class='well'>
  <%= form_for [@pig, @weight] do |f| %>
  <div class='form-group'>
    <%= f.label :date %>
    <br>
    <%= f.text_field :date, "data-provide" => 'datepicker' %>
  </div>
  <div class='form-group'>
    <%= f.label :weight %>
    <br>
    <%= f.number_field :weight, step: 0.5 %>
  </div>
  <%= f.submit(@weight.new_record? ? "Add weight" : "Update weight", class:'btn btn-success') %>
  <% end %>
</div>

Answer 1

Rails is not able to parse this date format out of the box. But you can add a custom setter to your model to fix that problem:

# in app/models/batch.rb
def date=(string)
  write_attribute(:date, DateTime.strptime(string, '%m/%d/%Y'))
end

Answer 2

As you can see from the below result,

This is not a valid date to parse "02/14/2016"

[3] ruby_project »  Date.parse("02/14/2016")
ArgumentError: invalid date
[4] ruby_project »  DateTime.parse("02/14/2016")
[4] ruby_project »  DateTime.parse("02/14/2016")
ArgumentError: invalid date
from (pry):4:in `parse'
[5] ruby_project » 

Try with valid date and tell me if it works