jQuery Validate Date/Check If Is Date

Far as I can tell, and that’s pretty far even though I do wonder if you can actually measure telling in distance, there isn’t a method directly used for validating a date in jquery. I find this rather odd. Not odd like how people keep watching Uwe Bol movies, more like odd that no one has tried to make a time machine to prevent them from ever appearing.

Anyways, bad movies… horrible movies… worst movies of all time aside, there is a date checking method, just not directly in jquery. It’s actually in the jquery.ui.datepicker.js file which is part of the UI files. Basically I grabbed that file and used the parseDate method on it coupled with a try catch. After all, a failure in the parseDate method throws an exception, and we don’t like those. No we don’t. (Which begs the question as why it throws an exception instead of just returning a null date.)

function isValidDate(controlName, format){
    var isValid = true;

    try{
        jQuery.datepicker.parseDate(format, jQuery('#' + controlName).val(), null);
    }
    catch(error){
        isValid = false;
    }

    return isValid;
}

Very simple, and it works. You could ask why I didn’t just roll my own date method, and then I would ask you how ambitious do you think I am? Then you would punch me because I answered your question with a question like a complete tool bag. Then I would cry. And THEN I would answer your original question. Fact is, I trust that the method created for the DatePicker is in fact well tested, otherwise the whole jquery thing just isn’t worth trusting seeing as it’s a part of their core library. And that I just refuse to believe.