Last modified: 2011-01-09 16:00:09 UTC
Hi, currently dates stored on wiki pages render automatically in query results, depending on the language used in the wiki. I suggest to introduce a configuration setting which allows to suppress automatic formatting of dates in query results and thus avoiding things like e. g. German: "8 Januar 2011". This would make it possible to keep the input and stored format, too. The automatically rendered format varies in the space that is consumed and is additionally in most cases more space consuming (up to 16) in comparison to e. g. a date format like YYYY/MM/DD (always 10). Cheers [[kgh]]
The date datatype already support a plain format that returns an ISO formatted international date string. You can trigger this behaviour by putting "#ISO" behind Type:Date printout requests in queries. We do not plan to introduce other complex formatting options besides this (there are, of course, many time/date formatting functions in various programming languages and in MediaWiki, most of which are not able to handle dates outside the Unix era). Parser functions could be used to further massage the ISO date string, or (if this is needed frequently and there is at most one date per page) one could additionally store year, month, and/or day in separate property values.
Hi, as you can imaging I was not aware of this specific printout statement. However this is a very important one. I have just added some documentation about it on "smw.org" which was lacking on the page Type:Date. Apart from that, thank you for you help and advice Cheers [[kgh]]
