Datepicker in EssenceDate cannot consume localized date format

[gilgor]

EssenceDate should always provide the ISO-8601 time format for the datepicker, e.g. 2017-03-07. Otherwise jquery.datetimepicker cannot handle the localized date format (when using another locale than EN in the backend interface).

We will have a closer look at it this week and provide a fix.

[robinboening]

I investigated this issue now - and after two hours of debugging I found that this is not related to the jquery datepicker but to chrome!

This issue only appears when you are using a type date field. What happens is that google chrome creates its own datepicker when you have a type date field but it complains if the date format is not as it expects it to be and as the result is that it doesn't fill in the given date - that is why the field is empty when you (re)load the page.

Related links:

• When it was introduced in chrome in 2014 is was even an error - now its only a warning (but obviously chrome still does not handle the format and ignores it): https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=397952#c3
• Don't use type-"date" for the HTML element uxsolutions/bootstrap-datepicker#1809

Unfortunately the tests in Alchemy are not able to catch the issue because the value of the date field is set correctly, but its not visible to the user.

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The solution for Alchemy is fairly simple:
Instead of rendering a date type field, we can just render a text field. That fixes the issue.

Edit: Its not that simple... for example in iOS the correct interface for picking the date is shown if the field is from the correct type. Changing to type text would stop iOS from doing that.

Edit 2: Actually Alchemy replaces the date type with text already if its not iOS. https://github.com/AlchemyCMS/alchemy_cms/blob/master/app/assets/javascripts/alchemy/alchemy.datepicker.js.coffee#L26-L27 but chrome comes first, does not accept the value and throws the warning.

[robinboening]

I came up with a proposal:

• Always render the input fields with type text
• On iOS we switch the attribute to the appropriate type (date/datetime/time)

PR: #1246

[moritzps]

This was merged in this PR so I will close this issue.