jquery datepicker get minDate (formatted to mm/dd/yyyy)

Question

Using jQuery datePicker, I set minDate to "-3y".

When I call:

$mydatepicker.datepicker("option", "minDate")

I get

-3y

Is it possible using datePicker methods to get it as mm/dd/yyyy?

Answer 1

Unfortunately datepicker does not offer a public API that handles relative dates, just internal methods that do that.
Consider calculating the minDate server side - that is what I ended up doing.

If you still absolutely need it:

// DO NOT USE THIS IN PRODUCTION CODE!!
var minDate = $.datepicker._getMinMaxDate( $mydatepicker.data('datepicker'), 'min' ),
    zeroPad = function( toPad, padToLength ) {
        toPad = toPad.toString();
        var i = toPad.length;
        while( i < padToLength  )
            toPad = '0' + toPad, i++;

        return toPad;
    }
    formattedMinDate = zeroPad( minDate.getMonth(), 2 ) + '/'
                       zeroPad( minDate.getDay(), 2 ) + '/'
                       minDate.getFullYear();

Please note that the code above is -bad- and you should not be using it as it relies on private methods that might disappear without notice in the future.

Answer 2

You should do

var date = $mydatepicker.datepicker({ dateFormat: 'dd-mm-yy' }).val();

Alternatively, you can also do:

var date = $mydatepicker.datepicker('getDate');
$.datepicker.formatDate('dd-mm-yy', date);

If you want it as an object, you can remove the .val()

More Info available at http://docs.jquery.com/UI/Datepicker/formatDate and jQuery UI DatePicker - Change Date Format