Question

I haven't managed to find out how to format the date. It could be a whole wiki setting or even a simple form attribute, anything would do it.

I need to change it to "yyyymmdd", so that it can correctly sort the field's column in a search over the forms.

Thanks.

Environment

-- DanielGermann - 17 Nov 2008

Answer

If you answer a question - or have a question you asked answered by someone - please remember to edit the page and set the status to answered. The status is in a drop-down list below the edit box.

You can change dates into a sortable format using SpreadSheetPlugin formulas. First, convert a date into a serialized format, then convert it back to a format of choice. Here is an example of changing "28 May 2012" into a sortable format:

%CALC{$FORMATTIME($TIME(28 May 2012), $year-$month-$day)}%

Which returns: 2012-05-28

You can put the CALC into the SEARCH format parameter. Assuming you have a form field called "Deadline" containing a date you can specify this format:
format="| .... | $percntCALC{$FORMATTIME($TIME($formfield(Deadline)), $year-$month-$day)}$percnt | ... |"

Please note that you need to escape the % of the CALC in order to have it executed once per search hit.

You can pre-sort a table by using TABLE variable.

See details in VarSEARCH, FormattedSearch, SpreadSheetPlugin, TablePlugin

-- PeterThoeny - 18 Nov 2008