Please standardize dates...

LegacyUser

crhansen said: This is a wonderful database and a very powerful tool! Just a suggestion... Convert all standardized (i.e. unambiguous) dates to an internal date code, and allow people to display dates in personalized formats/languages. Saves time and prevents edit conflicts.

LegacyUser

Juli said: Um, that's exactly what the Family Tree does ....?

LegacyUser

Jordi Kloosterboer said: I think he wants an option to display dates in different formats according to your own personal preference. Like show all dates as January 1, 1999 or 1 Jan 1999 etc. (just to your own eyes)

LegacyUser

crhansen said: What am I missing? The Family Tree only displays years. Any individual person's page displays dates in whatever format they were created in. Why should a European be forced into using English, or the crazy mo/day, day/mo reversals. At least, 3 letter month codes would be less insulting. Most of those match up pretty well: Oct/Okt, unless your are French. I'm suggesting specifying language/format in the user profile, and auto-translating to match the user's preference. One common format inside the database would be more consistent with an escape to undefined string when the date is still ambiguous.

LegacyUser

Adrian Bruce said: "The Family Tree only displays years"
The actual tree diagrams only show years - but that's for reasons of space (so is unlikely to change even if your set-up could take it).

The pop-up card and the actual profile show the full details in whatever format and language your display is set for (if that sounds vague, that's because it works for me and I'm not going to alter it to check!)

However, if stuff has been "decorated" for perfectly sensible reasons (e.g. I've added a day of week to a date) then the display and standard don't match and the translation stuff doesn't work. And some apparently standard dates - aren't.

LegacyUser

Robert Wren said: Welcome to the forum!!

Reading Gordon's comments on the subject in this month old post might help your understanding:

https://getsatisfaction.com/familysea...

I notice he also answered one of your other posts!

LegacyUser

crhansen said: "The Family Tree only displays years." I'm not unhappy with that. If the dates have been decorated or are ambiguous, the program could escape to an unspecified string variable, but for the vast majority of dates an internal definition is used which may be displayed in any format. Having solid dates would propagate to the search engine to search only for people with exact matching birth dates, etc. A huge time saver!

LegacyUser

Paul said: In the past, it was possible to enter exact dates to search fields, but it was pointed out by a FamilySearch manager that the program only picked up on the years, regardless. If anything, FamilySearch seems to be moving away from "exact" searches, as it is felt records could be missed by users being too specific (e.g. the records for a 23 April 1823 burial might have been incorrectly indexed as 22 April 1823 or 23 April 1822.) I don't think there is any chance of implementing your suggestion, which has been requested previously on a number of occasions.

LegacyUser

crhansen said: I understand, but I'd still like to be able to narrow it down at times. Thanks, -crh

LegacyUser

Adrian Bruce said: If you want to do exact searching on dates (and the ability to specify an exact search is a perfectly sensible idea) then that's one thing. But that didn't seem to be what your request was about, so I'm confused about what you really need.