date display formatting

[jrochkind]

Things we didn't get to in #718.

• date formatting
• ~I would still like to argue for hiding public domain limit unless you have search box focused, and add a date constraint there too. Relevant to #770 (requires public domain limit showing up in 'you searched for')~ no longer relevant with additional UX changes in this direction.
• ~"you searched for" constraints on collections page~ done

[jrochkind]

renamed to "date display formatting" cause that's the only thing left here.

[jrochkind]

@eddierubeiz the dates right now show up "unformatted" as 2018-01-01. My thought was to put the month in there instead 2018-Jan-01, or something (anything) like that. (Note some dates are just year, or just month and year, or ranges, etc).

Additionally, there is some weirdness with the qualifiers. For instance, some dates now show up as "1950s (decade)", where just "1950s" is probably fine. (On the other hand, 1900s may need a decade vs century qualifier, I dunno).

I suggest you play around in a dev or staging copy with the date entry in management screen, to see all the possibilities (some of the things date entry allows don't actually make any sense though; validation is a separate ticket :) ), and see what you think makes sense.

[eddierubeiz]

Sounds great.

[jrochkind]

oh, and replace the hyphen with a proper en-dash (which most style guides say to use for date ranges) was also on my list. :)

[eddierubeiz]

I've never worked anywhere that knew – much less cared – about the difference. (See what I did there?)

[jrochkind]

Also note that while the current code formats dates at indexing time and stores the formatted string in the index -- due to recent work, we know have access to the complete date structures at display-time, so you could instead choose to format it from date data at display-time, on the fly. Either are plausible approaches.

[eddierubeiz]

OK -- this took forever but I learned a lot. Some notes about this initial attempt:

• I'm leaving the data in the index exactly as is and formatting at display time by parsing the JSON.
• In doing so, I'm subclassing https://github.com/sciencehistory/chf-sufia/blob/master/app/models/time_span.rb ( I could also simply add a couple methods to the original class, of course, but I did want to play around with inheritance and module namespaces a bit. )
• I'm using en dashes, which look noticeably nicer. (In researching this I learned that "en dash" is not hyphenated.)
• I can make arbitrary other changes to the dates before they get displayed. I did your "2018-Jan-01" just as a warm up; so far I've left decades, centuries, and other fancy features untouched. But the sky's the limit now; I'll just override more methods from time_span.rb as needed.
• I want to refactor the presenter and template a bit so my fields looks more like the surrounding ones. Maybe I'll add a partial.