Feature Proposal: SEARCH should be able to sort according to date strings in forms

Motivation

Often I would rather use a comma-delimited or a bulleted list for lists built using a SEARCH, but I have to use a table if I want the results ordered by a date field in a form.

Description and Documentation

How do we tell order to sort by dates depends on either an extra parameter (order='formfield(somefield) asdate') (perhaps order='date(somefield)') or adding a time/date formfield to the core, or to add this functionality to the JSCalendarContrib - thus forcing the development to consider plugable formfield data types, and an API for searching, sorting, rendering and so on.

Examples

Impact

Implementation

-- Contributors: ShawnDowler - 07 Oct 2008

Discussion

agreed - but how do we deal with the US habit of putting the month before the day in numerical dates?

-- SvenDowideit - 08 Oct 2008

That's a good question, but I don't think it needs to be addressed here. I just think the same sorting that's currently available in the TablePlugin should be exposed in the SEARCH order as well.

If someone wants to tackle the backwards US date format, that's fine, but I would call that out of scope for this feature request

I searched thoroughly for a solution to this, but keep coming up with the same answer over and over again. UseAFormFieldDateToSortAList is 1 year old and has the exact same workaround: use a table and sort that. I just thought that it might not be too much trouble to implement date handling in the order of a SEARCH. I would use it all the time.

-- ShawnDowler - 08 Oct 2008

considering that VarSEARCH already has order="created" and order="modified" and order="formfield(somefield)", I agree it should be simple-ish - presumably with a 'random' result if there are no dates in the specified formfield, and so on..

-- SvenDowideit - 08 Oct 2008

I think the reason that order="created" and order="modified" work without much fuss is because they are already in seconds since 1970 format, so they sort automatically. A call to something similar to d2n needs to take place on the field if it's a date in order to get the sort to work properly.

Ideally, I'd like to have the date data type in the form field use seconds since 1970 internally just like the modified and created dates do, but that would break a lot of things, I'd imagine.

-- ShawnDowler - 09 Oct 2008