Initiative:

Create a standardized form field for date entry, providing automated
validation and error handling

Reasons:

* We have now proper form validation
* Usability improvements and consistent user experience are on top of the Drupal "battle plan"

Issues:

Issues raised on the discussion:
http://lists.drupal.org/archives/drupal-devel/2003-12/msg00861.html

What field format? Three alternatives were offered:

a) row of dropdowns
- easy to parse & validate
- should incorporate Javascript to make it behave locically (user selects "Feb", dynamically remove the "30" and "31" from "day" dropdown)
- slower date entry
- not always flexible (in some cases the time field(s) are needed, sometimes not)

b) textfield for manual entry
+ quick entry for power users
- utterly complex date parsing and validation

c) provide both, make it a configuration option
- arrgh-not-another-config-option!!!

Background reading about date entry usability and issues:

http://www.travelucd.com/research/pdf/date_entry_hotel_july2002.pdf
http://www.peachpit.com/content/images/073571410X/samplechapter/07357141...

Comments

moshe weitzman’s picture

moshe weitzman commented

Profile.module has some nifty logic for displaying date selectors on an input form. Move that logic to common.inc so other modules may benefit. See _profile_date_field(). It uses the row of 3 dropdowns to compose a date. The javascript would be nice but it isn't a requirement, IMO

Chris Johnson’s picture

Chris Johnson commented

Some additional considerations:

1. Validating what's in the fields is a very different thing from providing the HTML form fields in a standard way, as long as we are talking about not using Javascript to do it. If this "task" is supposed to include validation, well, then it is a ten to thirty times larger task and includes changing a lot more code. That's the reason I created a separate new task and patch for just adding the HTML date form.

2. Some other advantages and disadvantages for each method.

a) Row of dropdowns
+ Nice for the point and click crowd
- Really annoying for the touch-typist crowd as they do not work consistently when attempting to type the value wanted.

b) One big textfield to type the date.
- Just plain unworkable. There are too many valid date format variations if you want to validate as in #1 above.

c) Configuration selection between the two.
+ Allow the user to choose which format he wants since that is who it most affects?

Instead of (b), one big text field, I believe my 3-text field solution is far better, and best for touch typists. Validating each field is simple.

Chris Johnson’s picture

Chris Johnson commented
Assigned: Unassigned » Chris Johnson

Duplicate of http://drupal.org/node/12218. Please go there.