= validates_timeliness

  * Source:  http://github.com/adzap/validates_timeliness
  * Tickets:


== DESCRIPTION

The time and date validation has always been a problem in Rails. To do it 
properly you need to fiddle with the Rails internals a fair bit. Where once 
there may have been hope of including more support for this validation in Rails,
since the release of Rails 2.1 those hopes were dashed as it has become an order
of magnitude harder due the excellent additions of the improved timezone handling
and dirty attributes.

This plugin allows the validation of dates and times in Rails 2.0.x and above. 


== FEATURES/PROBLEMS

* Adds ActiveRecord validation for dates and times

* Adds better traceability of dates and times entered with the use the 
  before_type_cast for date and time columns to look at the original value 
  entered before type casting.

* Allows pluggable date and time parsing with other parsers of your choosing (eg Chronic)

== INSTALLATION

./script/plugin http://github.com/adzap/validates_timeliness


== USAGE

To validate a model with a date or datetime attribute you just use the validation
method

  class Person < ActiveRecord::Base
    validates_timeliness_of :date_of_birth
  
  end

The default valid formats for a date or datetime field are those supported by 
the Ruby ParseDate library (http://www.ruby-doc.org/docs/ProgrammingRuby/html/lib_standard.html#ParseDate.parsedate).

  
The validation method has the usual options plus some specific ones to restrict
the valid range

  Options:
    - allow_nil
    - allow_blank    
    - before
    - on_or_before
    - after
    - on_or_after
    - type