better_am_pm

A gem monkey-patching Rails to provide user-friendly 12-hour time select form controls.

Why?

The default Rails time select control (for 3.2+) gives two select menus: an hours menu with values 00..23, and a minutes menu with values 00..59. The minutes are fine, but for users in regions where 12-hour time is prevalent, the hours present an extra challenge.

Rails allows developers to pass an option (ampm: true) to use 12-hour hour inputs, but this replaces the labels for values 00..23 with 12 AM, 01 AM, 02 AM, etc. This results in selectors which read like this:

07AM:30

...which isn't very good-looking and an extra cognitive load on the end-user.

In this library, we add an additional option (twelve_hour: true) which removes the trailing "AM" and "PM" from these options and instead wraps the hour options in two optgroup tags, labeled am and pm. This allows the user to clearly see which hours are AM and which are PM, but also lets the time selector read more smoothly (i.e. "7:30").

Notes

• Selected times won't show a meridian, so developers may wish to provide an additional control, perhaps adjusted with Javascript, to show the meridian based on the selected hour.

• If the leading_zeros option is set to false it will remove leading zeroes from the hours 0-9. (This is Rails' existing option, not something added with this patch.)

TODO

• Anything to simplify the code, ideally only touching where we need to.

• Can we be more elegant/safer about the way this duck-punches Rails?

• Add a meridian-display option and scripts.

• Default handling: should this take the default select? Also, should this actually replace Rails' :ampm options?

Contributors

Swatches was originally developed by Parker Morse and is maintained by District Management Group.