Support various date formats when date picker is filled via copy/paste
the date entry fields for Calendar, Milestones, Task Due Dates, etc are unable to parse dates of the following form, such that copy & pasting such values from other sources usually ends up just defaulting the field to "tomorrow". If one just clicks "OK" on the dialog before hitting "enter" to validate the field, the wrong date gets recorded silently.
The only format that is accepted is
Dec 9, 2016 (mmm d, yyyy)
Failing formats:
Friday, December 9, 2016
December 9, 2016
December 9
Dec 9
Dec 9 2016
12/9/16
12/09/16
2016/12/09
16/12/9
etc.
The date entry widget should be more flexible to accept copy & paste from other sources
I am open here for suggestion for coders using Freedcamp for a date picker plugin which understands copy/paste operations with various formats conversion.
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David M. commented
@Chris, I'm not referring to a control that allows me to choose a single format that would apply across the app. I mean a control that can parse all of these formats at once.
You may receive lists of information with dates from many sources, or have different users that use different conventions.
It's not a ridiculous notion. I've built exactly this type of control for financial industry client applications. Traders, brokers & clerks have many shorthands for date formats. including the above formats, 9Dec, 9Dec20 (with and without spaces) as well as tenor dates 3mo, 1yr, 30d, etc. would all work at any time in a single control.
Something off the shelf is not going to do this, but if you are able to build custom controls (maybe enhancing an existing one through inheritence), it's fairly straightforward.
You basically have the control try to parse & validate the input with successive formats until it succeeds, only failing if they all fail, then present the uniformly formatted result back to the user. (we used DevExpress or Infragistics base text box/date picker input controls to start, then attached the parsing sequence to that)
Note that it is only the parsing that tries different methods. You settle on one format (possibly a global setting) for display.
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@Chris - ability to set Monday as week start date in project Calendar app and Global Calendar Board is behind cog wheel icon.
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Chris commented
Thanks David, I'm missing that one as well. It could probably be implemented as easily as it's done in Wordpress, where the Date and Time format is a global variable: https://codex.wordpress.org/Formatting_Date_and_Time.
I'm used to being able to add a German format like 1.10.16 for October 1, 2016, having to pick it from the calendar is a bit of a nuisance, as is having to type in American formats.
Thanks!
Additionally, it would be nice to choose the first day of the week, too. The calendar currently starts with Sundays, but over here, we use Monday as the first weekday.