MomentJS not returning correctly formatted date

[stevemacn]

When modifying the awesome theme. The following line should return May 2015:

h.formatDate("2015-05","MMM YYYY")

For every possible month (even full dates "2015-05-10") it always returns Jan XXX where XXX is the correct year passed to Moment. Is there something I'm missing? Looking at the coffeescript I couldn't find anywhere obvious that a mistake was made.

[hacksalot]

Thanks for the report. Investigating...

[hacksalot]

I believe this is resolved in latest (v1.9.0-beta). If not, let me know-- the version with that bug is a couple years old.

[kapgit]

I have the same problem with

• HackMyResume v1.9.0-beta
• node v9.8.0
• Windows 10 Pro

Context:

I'm using hackmyresume to generate a Word resume.

hackmyresume build myfreshresume.json to wordresume.doc -t mytemplate-doc.xml

Extract of myfreshresume.json (FRESH schema):

...
  "education": {
    "level": "",
    "history": [
      {
        "institution": "Some institution",
        "end": "2017-02-12",
        "curriculum": [
          "Some curriculum"
        ],
        "summary": "",
        "area": "Some area",
        "studyType": "Certification"
      }
    ]
  },
...

In the Word 2003 XML template file mytemplate-doc.xml (using handlebars templating notation):

...
{{#each r.education.history}}{{formatDate end "MMM YYYY"}}
...

Problem

When running hackmyresume, I get the actual output 'Jan 2017' instead of the expected 'Feb 2017'.

Analysis

I had a quick look in the HackMyResume code, more specifically in .\npm\node_modules\hackmyresume\dist\helpers\generic-helpers.js.

1. The generic helper function 'formatDate' expects a parameter 'dtFormat':

@param {string} [dtFormat='YYYY-MM'] The desired datetime format. Must be a Moment.js-compatible datetime format.

I understand from this description that 'dtFormat' is meant to be the output format defining how a given date should be formatted in the generated resume.

2. However, 'dtFormat' passed to the 'moment' constructor (line 70) is the format used to parse the given date:

momentDate = moment(datetime, dtFormat);

as documented in https://momentjs.com/docs/#/parsing/string-format/:

moment(String, String);

If you know the format of an input string, you can use that to parse a moment.

moment("12-25-1995", "MM-DD-YYYY");

My conclusion and workaround

As the date format used in the resume JSON file ("YYYY-MM-DD") may be different than the desired format in the output resume (here: "MMM YYYY"), I believe the 'dtFormat' parameter should not be passed to the 'moment' constructor.

To test this, I replaced 'dtFormat' with a hard-coded "YYYY-MM-DD" (format used in the JSON resume) on line 70. This workaround seems to work as expected. Now the date output is 'Feb 2017'.

...
      if (String.is(datetime)) {
        // If a string was passed in, convert to Moment using the 2-paramter
        // constructor with an explicit format string.
        momentDate = moment(datetime, "YYYY-MM-DD" /*dtFormat*/);
        if (momentDate.isValid()) {
          return momentDate.format(dtFormat);
        }
...

BTW, I noted a similar issue in the 'date' generic helper function, defined at line 97, and 'moment' constructor at line 116. Worked around it with

dateValueMoment = moment(dateValue,"YYYY-MM-DD" /* dateFormat*/);

[hacksalot]

Thanks for the awesome writeup. Date handling code needs to be rewritten for v2.0 until then I think your solution is workable. We're not "agnostic" enough in the handling where we need to be and we're not specific enough when we can be.