Unable to set date/time selectors to not required. [#11572]

I believe it's necessary for the "date/time" item in Flexinode to have "--" choices for each part of the date and time.

I'm filing this as a bug, because if one has a date/time item in a flexinode, the "Required field" checkbox in "add field" doesn't have any effect. This occurs because the date/time menus have no blank selectors, they will always be filled in.

This will give unexpected results when a user is only expected to enter date/time info sometimes. (Info will always get added. The user may not even notice until after the node has been submitted, as they may not have even touched the date/time menus.)

I propose we add "--" items at the top of each menu. Ideally, we should probably default to have the "--" selected, as it isn't good UI to have a field automatically populated with not-necessarily-relevant info.

This way a user could also selectively enter relevant info, like only having "January 2004" instead of being forced to enter every field.

I took a look at the code, and tried to patch it myself, but it was all too complicated, and required too many changes for my skill level (I got the $years working though!)

Comments

Comment #1

rkendall CreditAttribution: rkendall commented 16 February 2005 at 18:34

Having the option to not enter information relating to the date/time, sounds like a good idea, but changing the interface won't do much until the way the field works changes.

The date/time flexinode field stores the information as a unix timestamp (number) in the database, so it is impossible to _not_ set one particular component.

I wanted to only display Month and Year for a website, and managed to achieve this by overriding theme_flexinode_timestamp() with my theme.

Maybe this issue should be combined with
http://drupal.org/node/9700
as they seem to be about the same thing.