Plugin: Filter by date [#1920726]

Some of the feeds that I am importing have feed items dated in the future. This forces them to the top of all my search results and effectively pins them there for good. I needed a method to remove those.

Following is a patch designed to work on the Publication date field from RSS importers.

Ideally it would be extended to encompass a range of dates. Eg:
From: -1Y
To: -2W

But that isn't my current use case.

Hope someone finds it useful.

Comment	File	Size	Author
#2	feeds_tamper-filter_future_dates-1920726-2.patch	2.68 KB	queenvictoria
#2
#1	feeds_tamper-filter_future_dates-1920726-1.patch	1.03 KB	queenvictoria
#1

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Comments

Comment #1

queenvictoria CreditAttribution: queenvictoria commented 19 February 2013 at 00:40

File	Size
feeds_tamper-filter_future_dates-1920726-1.patch	1.03 KB

Patch attached

Comment #2

queenvictoria CreditAttribution: queenvictoria commented 7 March 2013 at 09:46

File	Size
feeds_tamper-filter_future_dates-1920726-2.patch	2.68 KB

Updated to accept specific dates. Use case: Published date is sometimes not set in RSS feeds (or set to zero which can render 1900-01-01T06:00:00Z for example). Or you might just want recent articles to come in.

So invert the filter and set the date to 1990-01-01 to filter out items prior to 1990.

The new date field in this filter will accept relative times too. So you can say
"-2 years"
or
"last Friday two years ago"
or anything else supported by strtotime http://php.net/manual/en/function.strtotime.php

Leaving the date field empty will assume `now()`. So by default (without arguments) it will filter out future items.

Comment #3

queenvictoria CreditAttribution: queenvictoria commented 8 March 2013 at 19:39

Does anyone know--is the reason that testbot isn't looking at this because there are no tests written for it?

Comment #4

Als

Milano, Italia

CreditAttribution: Als commented 8 November 2013 at 18:36

Trying your filter, really useful considering that to skip content depending on its date is standard practice in data flows.

The filter appears in tamper, the configuration works. I can set the date, the system checks it upon save, the import results are the exact opposite if I check "invert".

However, I am not able to have the filter understand the date passed for the check. I have tried to import dates in the following formats (CSV import):
YYYY/MM/DD
YYYY-MM-DD
DD/MM/YYYY
DD-MM-YYYY

Time is never present.
The date configured in the filter falls in the middle of the imported nodes, so I should see some imported and some skipped. Instead, it is all or nothing (hence I understand that the "invert" option is working).

Thanks in advance for any help!

Comment #5

Als

Milano, Italia

CreditAttribution: Als commented 8 November 2013 at 19:47

Answering my own question: the filter understands a date in Unix format (timestamp). Would be good to write it on screen in the description.

The standard Feeds Tamper package already has a plugin to convert an English date to timestamp. So, all I need now is a sed rule to tamper the CSV so my Italian dates (oh well!) become English.

Even if I am the only one who provided feedback in 9 months, I urge the maintainer of the module to include this date filter ASAP. It is really something you would expect to be able to filter on.

Comment #6

Als

Milano, Italia

CreditAttribution: Als commented 8 November 2013 at 19:49

Issue summary:	View changes
Status:	Needs review	» Reviewed & tested by the community

Comment #7

twistor CreditAttribution: twistor commented 12 July 2014 at 01:10

Title:	Filter to prevent the import of future dated feed items	» Plugin: Filter by date
Status:	Reviewed & tested by the community	» Needs work
Issue tags:		+Needs tests

This should really be more generic to apply.

Also, I wonder if it would be more useful to filter by number. Either greater, less than or equal to. And just convert the date to a timestamp using another plugin.