Nightmares with datetime_select and the attr_locked plugin

Yesterday, a co-worker had some growing pains when updating a Rails 1.2.3 application to Rails 2.1. I gladly came to the rescue (he actually saved me from a boring job) and we analyzed together what was the error we were getting on the app.

The thing happened to be on the form_helper method

datetime_select

<% form_for :mode do |f| -%> <!-- some html code --> <%= f.datetime_select :recent_called_at, :order => [:year, :month, :day] %> <% end -%>

A chunk of code (just like the one above) was throwing an exception that said:

ArgumentError: wrong number of arguments (1 for 2)

The exception was getting threw inside a method called

date_or_time_select

that was being invoked; inside the

datetime_select

method.

We checked out the plugins that could overwrite this method, and

attr_locked

was doing it via

alias_method_chain

. The problem was that, this overwrite didn't provide the correct number of parameters for the Rails 2.1 version (the Rails 2.1 version of

datetime_select

accepts an extra hash parameter called html_options). We made some little changes to the current implementation and it worked as expected.

Hope you can get some benefits from this patch