General info:

One of the goals with the original DatePicker widget was to not build it specifically into a container widget. That way, it would be flexible for someone to place it into whatever container type they found to be most useful. To just include a date picker in the page, you can use the following simple markup: <div dojoType="datepicker"></div>

To get the value out of the DatePicker, you can either read the value of the DatePicker instance's storedDate property

Or, to be updated any time the value changes, you can connect to the setDate method to listen for any change in the DatePicker's stored value:

                        function handler(rfcDate) {
                                dojo.debug(rfcDate);
                        }
                        dojo.event.connect(dojo.widget.byId("foo"), "setDate", handler);
                

Note that the date is returned in an RFC3339 date format, of the form 2005-06-30T08:05:00-07:00

Dropdown version

The most common use case for a DatePicker is a small dropdown icon representation that is connected to a form field. The example makes a somewhat naive attempt at syncing the value in form field with the value displayed in the DatePicker. It also shows the usage of throwing together a quick custom widget in a custom namespace.