"Relative date" to be offered as a Formatting option for date columns in Reports

[miyamotoh]

In the Formatting tab of a Report, when you have a date column, you'll have the following formatting options;

Basically just how date/time elements (ie. Y, M, D, H, M, S, Z) are shown/arranged. However, in some cases, "relative date" (eg. "days since") is desired rather than a raw date value, no matter how it's formatted.

[Fryguy]

@MelsHyrule I wonder if one of the new UI people can work on this one since it's small and self-contained. WDYT?

[MelsHyrule]

@miq-bot assign @MelsHyrule

[mahantidinesh7]

@Fryguy we need to have one more option with Days since and that should display the number of days that were passed on till now from the mentioned date in the report . Am i correct ??

[Fryguy]

Days since implies a starting point (i..e Days since what), but the data doesn't have that ability. Instead, I said "relative date" as I'd expect the type of output you would see from ActionView::Helpers::DateHelper.time_ago_in_words (e.g. 1 minute ago, 3 hours ago)

[kbrock]

I thought we could tap into those view helpers. Do you remember if we still have this?

tapping into the module without requiring creating a new helper e.g.:

date_helper = Class.new { include ActionView::Helpers::DateHelper }.new

[Fryguy]

Yes, that's exactly how we would do it. You can also do helper = Module.new { extend ActionView::Helpers::DateHelper }, which might be a little lighter:

[1] pry(main)> require "action_view"
[2] pry(main)> helper = Module.new { extend ActionView::Helpers::DateHelper }
[3] pry(main)> ls helper
ActionView::Helpers::DateHelper#methods:
  date_select      distance_of_time_in_words         select_date      select_day   select_minute  select_second  select_year        time_select
  datetime_select  distance_of_time_in_words_to_now  select_datetime  select_hour  select_month   select_time    time_ago_in_words  time_tag
[4] pry(main)> helper.time_ago_in_words(Time.now + 6000)
=> "about 2 hours"

[kbrock]

cross posting. We have ApplicationController.helpers that has all those mixed in.
Not sure how expensive it is to reference that memory wise. It may be instantiated no matter what.