Hi, I have all sorts of partial Dates: Year, Mon / Year but also Day / Mon and even Mon. The last two formats cannot be accommodated by the DatePrecision selection field, so I would have to enter them in the verbatimDate field. That’s not a big problem, but it would be good to have all dates (partial and full) in the same field. Is it possible to add Day / Mon and Mon to the DatePrecision options? If so, would dates with those formats be stored in the database as DD/MM/1900 and 01/MM/1900?
Thanks, Soraya
Hi Soraya,
The ‘Day/Mon’ and ‘Mon’ are not valid date strings. You do not want them in a Date field, as you will get in trouble when you exchange your data. It would also cause a problem in your own database, as you will not be able to sort your dates anymore, or look for records from a certain period.
Hi Niels,
Day/Mon alone is still a partial Date, and relevant information, but it’s true that having them in a Date field in the database would create a problem when sharing data.
We use startDateVerbatim as ‘Date as Given’ where we can record this kind of partial date.
Hi @sorosoro,
Unfortunately, the date fields in the database cannot store day and month information alone.
MySQL’s DATE fields can store both the day and month along with the year. It does not allow storing only the day and month without the year. This means it is not currently possible to add dates with only ‘Day / Mon’ or ‘Mon’ information only to the same field that we store other dates in.
@rdrinkwater’s method is the approach we recommend, where you store this verbatim date information in a text field outside the regular date field for situations like the ones you mentioned in your initial post!
Here when we speak of a partial date we mean a date with low resolution and that is how it is accommodated in MySQL and the meaning in ISO 8601. A known month in an unknown year is not a date so much as a time of year.