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USGS-WiM / SiGLDMS

Data management system for SiGL
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Project Start Date /Project Completion Date #231

Open mbreitmun opened 7 years ago

mbreitmun commented 7 years ago

Often, a project only has a year attributed to a start or end date. Currently the DMS doesn't accept anything less than month/date/year...I have had to enter months/days just to save the year in there. Can this be changed to simply accept a year? I think this will continue to be a problem for other users, if not. I feel weird 'making up' a date to get the year recorded. start_end_dates

HansVraga commented 7 years ago

@jlbruce Will need you to weigh in here. Is just a year acceptable?

jlbruce commented 7 years ago

Tonia may remember better, but I think our desire for the calendar widget forced our hand to collect a month, day, and year. For project where only a year is known, I've entered Jan 1 in the hopes that people will see this as a generic day (and similarly, for those with only month and year, I pick the 1st). I also remember that there was no way to get the calendar to enter these values as default if the user didn't select them (it defaults to the current day's information).

That said, Molly is correct - there are many people who only have a year, or month and year, and if there was a way to allow this or improve the entry so the generic dates were easier to enter, I'd be all for that.

troddick commented 7 years ago

The database uses field types (varchar, number, date, etc). A Date field type needs to be a full date. We have 2 options:

  1. I can change that field to a varchar, and any string you want can be typed in there "1/2/2017" or "2017" or "March/2017". I'm not recommending this option. This would make it very hard to apply any filtering/querying of the db for projects by a date. But if people will not know the date and only want to enter a year, I could restrict it to 4 digits only (the year).
  2. Leave it as is, because a date can not have an optional year or month, but needs to be a full year. We have addressed this issue by adding a tooltip to the start and end date fields. image

Thoughts?

mbreitmun commented 7 years ago

I agree with Tonia not recommending option 1 -that makes sense.

The tooltip is useful on the DMS side, but for someone using the mapper side, they will have to make the assumption it's a default day.

My thought: I think that the project date could stand alone with only a year (project start date can be subjective/fuzzy). The project sites could (should!) have their own precise mm/dd/yyyy sampling dates associated with them.

On Thu, Mar 16, 2017 at 7:45 AM, Tonia Roddick notifications@github.com wrote:

The database uses field types (varchar, number, date, etc). A Date field type needs to be a full date. We have 2 options:

  1. I can change that field to a varchar, and any string you want can be typed in there "1/2/2017" or "2017" or "March/2017". I'm not recommending this option. This would make it very hard to apply any filtering/querying of the db for projects by a date. But if people will not know the date and only want to enter a year, I could restrict it to 4 digits only (the year).
  2. Leave it as is, because a date can not have an optional year or month, but needs to be a full year. We have addressed this issue by adding a tooltip to the start and end date fields. [image: image] https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/1580076/23996674/4b18aa7e-0a1c-11e7-9a44-14d5b19e8581.png

Thoughts?

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-- Molly G Breitmün Physical Scientist Water Quality & Geomorphology USGS Wisconsin Water Science Center 8505 Research Way Middleton, WI 53562 Phone: 608-821-3853 Cell: 360-350-8662