My Goal: Replace the Default Cake Datepicker

I hate the default CakePHP FormHelper date-picker select elements and I'd like to use jQuery UI Datepicker widget instead. In order to degrade gracefully, I want to have a date field (enabled with the widget) and a time-picker select box constrained to 15-minute increments.

In case I explained that poorly, here is what it looks like:

date-picker sample

My Ideal Solution

To minimize repetition, I want to put the HTML in a layout Element and process it using a Behavior function. This way I could do something like the following:

view.ctp 

echo $this->element( 'datepicker', array( 'data' => $data ) );

model.php 

$actsAs = array( 'Datepicker' );

function beforeSave( $options ){
    $this->parseDatepickers();  //behavior function would alter $this->data
    return true;
}

The Problem

Unfortunately, by the time it gets to the beforeSave (or beforeValidate) callback, the datepicker & timepicker fields have been destroyed by the model's deconstruct function. deconstruct seems to be looking for dates & times to be reported the way FormHelper creates them.

In short, it's looking for:

[date_field] => Array
(
    [year] => 2011
    [month] => 11
    [day] => 11
    [hour] => 8
    [min] => 00
    [meridian] => pm
)

but instead it's finding:

[date_field] => Array
(
    [datepicker] => 11/11/2011
    [timepicker] => 8:00 pm
)

And because it doesn't find the structure it expects, I end up with this:

[date_field] =>

I know I can have jQuery update hidden inputs with the appropriately-named fields, but this woul

cakephp date cakephp-2.0
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