Defaulting format of date presentation other than MM/DD/YYYY

[mon_key]

When setting the global Date & Time device settings on an iphone (e.g. Settings -> General -> Date & Time) to 24-Hour time handbase will display time fields accordingly.

AFAICT there is not an equivalent global Date setting for the device and as such there is no way to override the handbase's default presentation for date fields, e.g. MM/DD/YYYY.

I'd like to be able to present dates in alternative formats; in particular YYYY/MM/DD form.

Likewise, I'd like the ability to specify alternative delimiters; in particular the "-" dash character, e.g. ASCII character 45 (in decimal).

[Brian_Houghton]

Hi,

HanDBase follows the default for the regional settings used for a device. For example, if an iPhone has its region set as the US, the default date format for the region is MM/DD/YYYY. HanDBase will default to this format.

It is not possible to switch HanDBase's date display to one other than what is used in the region settings.

[RogerLaw]

Does that mean that you won't consider enhancing HanDBase to offer users choice in this?

I use the YYYY-MM-DD format (because of all the advantages it gives) but Apple doesn't allow me to because I don't live in a country that uses it!

Microsoft does! Would be nice if HanDBase did.

[dhaupert]

Hi,

We'd definitely consider it! To actually do it there would need to be some demand from a number of users. Unfortunately we can't add a feature for just one user's request, or we'd wind up with an app with thousands of preference options that would only be useful and discernable by a single user

But if I hear this request from others either here or elsewhere, I'd be much more likely to implement this in the future. Let's see what happens!

[draak]

I too think that the YYYY-MM-DD format is very handy, esp. for filing by date. Is it terribly complicated to make this possible in HanDBase?

Dale

[uboche]

Date formats with the month first aren't used in most European countries. This format causes confusion because we're using date formats with the day of the month first. The format YYYY-MM-DD is very useful for sorting by date and it also has the advantage of being free of ambiguity.

[RogerLaw]

Dave, thanks for the reply . I'm sure many of your international users would like this.

To help our case please read: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-time.html. Which describes the many advantages of this ISO date format.

[verres]

I also would like to be able to use different date formats. A suggestion might be to add date functions to the calculation field type. Year(value) would retrieve the year... Month(value) the month etc... then folks could use concatenation to create whatever format they liked.

[dhaupert]

Hi all,

I'm aware of all of the advantages of this date format, however, most don't really apply to the date format used in HanDBase. Remember we don't store a date in text format. Since we store internally the date as a numeric value, sorting is already far faster and more useful for calculations.

I'm not saying I wouldn't add support for this since there are several of you asking for it already, just wondering why it is necessary considering that the key advantages don't apply here. Is it just because you are used to and prefer this format from using it elsewhere?

[glenwf]

How about the format dd/mm/yyyy?

I'll add that the biological scientific community records data in the dd/mm/yyyy format so when I look at my insect labels they are all like that and then I have to interpolate that into the database record format. Mistakes do occur due to this switching between formats.

So how about flexibility for us?