I, and likely many others, use the date entry to collect date of birth. However, we may only need to collect and/or display Month and Day, without the year. Not currently possible so it would be great either have another picker or make the month/date and year as individual subcomponents.
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It would be useful to have only a day and month picker. I have an app for alumni. Displaying all the birthdates is a security issues as scamsters specifically are looking for birthday, phone numbers. Displaying only the date and month would suffice.
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I know there was some conversation about this — @Mark mentioned that he’s been working on this for some time—wants to make sure he gets it right. Progress update?
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Could multiple fields be joined together using the new Join column, then somehow copied to a date column? Or use the new ability to change column types to make that joined column a date format?
Hmm that being said, assigning formats to columns like Templates, IFTHENs, Joins, etc would be cool!
Hi,
The Joined List can join several rows but belonging to same column (field).
Saludos
Not much progress on date/time manipulation yet, but in any case it wouldn’t involve a day/month picker. I suggest adding it to our feature requests app.
Ah okay makes sense.
Maybe the real feature request here should be the ability to assign a column format to a Template column. This way, you could create a template with separate Day/Month/Year choices, then format it as a Date column that Glide can compute as a Date.
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I have a real need for duplicating a date column but assigning a different format. I’d love to be able to fill one date column with a date/timestamp, format that date column as date only, then create a duplicate to format as time only. Only way to do this now is to duplicate the original date column in the sheet, then assign different formatting to each column. This introduces lag though. Or you can use the split texts column to split a date (depending on the format) into separate values, but there is no way to access each individual array item in the split text array. Maybe another option to date only and time only in the date column formatting would be a month/day only option.
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YES. THIS.
I must have silently wanted this feature a dozen times over. Thank you, Jeff, for putting words to it. Can you add it to the feature request app?
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Voted! Also loving the direct link!
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We thought about this, and I think the right thing to do is to allow you to pick a different format at the place where you’re using the column. The format you’re assigning in the data editor is what we call the “default format”. Duplicating to get a different format seems like an ugly kludge.
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But what if I need both?
eg. A Photo Gallery app
- Full date/time for a timestamp display
- Just Year to relate to all photos taken that year
- Just Month to realate to all photos taken that month
I’d need three columns. Only way to do this right now is in Sheets.
You can’t use formats to do 2 and 3. Formats only affect how the column is displayed, not how it behaves as a value.
What you need for 2 and 3 is a way of extracting the year and month from a date, i.e. date math.
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Date Math column it is then!
But really, right now app builders are duplicating LOTS of their columns to get the format right anyhow. I dunno how many times I need to duplicate an i-t-e column in order to add on units or wrap it with text in a template column, or relate an i-t-e column containing emails back to the user profiles sheet just do a lookup of that very email address because components don’t recognize i-t-es of emails/blanks as email addresses, OR duplicating number columns as text columns in order to preserve formatting or leading zeroes.
I say give the builders the option to duplicate to their hearts content!
After all, by your logic, we’re already doing that with a template column to “freeze” a date column as a string for relation purposes.
I know the functionality should be build correctly, but a “date template” column could merely display DDDD or MM/YYYY or whatever (regardless of the actual value) and then we could use a template column to “freeze” THAT value as a string for relation purposes.
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I think that would for display purposes. I assume one date column could then have multiple formats for each place that it’s displayed in the app, correct? In my case that would probably work.
As for @Robert_Petitto’s points 2 and 3…formatting outside of the data editor and inside the components wouldn’t work because you can’t create relations as he stated. True that formatting only affects how the value is displayed, but right now myself an many others use a template column to “lock in” the formatting of date, math, and number columns so you can work with the value in it’s formatted form. If there was a way to set the formatting to YYYY or MM only, then with a template you could lock in the formatting and use that template to create a relation.
Too stress what @Robert_Petitto is saying about duplicating lots of columns, here’s one of my examples:
- I have a date column with formatting set.
- I use a template column to “lock in” that formatting
- I have a second template column with a notes emoji if needed
- Finally I have an If/Then column that determines which template is needed for display purposes.
I know Robert is asking for more extensive formatting options for dates, but even a template column with a type designation could help if you need it to function as a certain column type for other conditions that only work with certain types, like dates or numbers.
All in all, this loosely goes back to my conditional relations request. Sure I can create a relation and filter it, but then I have no way to create a rollup on that filtered data. Point being that some things need to happen in the data editor and some things need to happen in the app editor.
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@Jeff_Hager - tangential query, did you have an issue using emoji in templates? I find that I can’t control the spacing between the emoji and neighbouring characters in the output string?
Same here, I think it’s too close.
@V88, @ThinhDinh I don’t think I’ve had noticeable issues with emoji and text spacing (I only deal with Android and Windows, so I’m not sure if IOS and Apple would be different or if different fonts would make a difference). I’d have to check again, but I’m pretty sure I just use a single space between the emoji and text. I believe glide trims extra spaces, between words, so you are limited to the spacing, but using https://emptycharacter.com/ could get you additional spacing with 2 or 3 empty characters added.
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