Hi there,
I am a beginner user of OO. My question concerns the strange behavior of this application when entering data in the date column. If I enter a date selected from the displayed calendar, I am not able to change the entry later using ‘parsing logic’ by typing text such as ‘today’, ‘tomorrow’, etc. When I enter ‘today’ in place of the previous date, OO treats it as a variable, which means that: 1. It does not change the previously entered value to today’s date. 2. Subsequent entries such as ‘yesterday’ will be counted from the originally selected date from the calendar, not from today’s date.
The ‘now’ function works correctly, but it also inputs the time alongside the date. However, the time cannot be selected using filters. Specifically, the time can be set, but it is not saved and is reset to 00. Are these errors, or is there something I am not aware of.
Thanks.
I think that is how the column type is supposed to work. If you check the help (use the inspectors > selection style inspectors > column type > supported date syntax) it explains how the ‘date’ column type works.
To address your first issue, I think that to reset the cell so that ‘yesterday’ means yesterday, you must enter today’s date using the calendar pop-up.
If you never use the pop-up, e.g. you enter 2/22 in a new row’s cell (or any other typed date), then yesterday will actually be yesterday. It’s only when you pick a date using the pop-up that you experience this stubbornness.
As to the time issues. You can choose a date format that includes time or one that doesn’t. This can be accessed in the inspector under ‘column type’. Note that if your entry includes a specific time (e.g. tomorrow at noon rather than tomorrow) then the cell value will include ‘12:00’ rather than ‘00:00’. If your format is date-only then you won’t see it but if you switch to a date/time format, then it will be there.
Finally, regarding filtering, the column type is ‘date’ and so anything under the column is a date object — not a time object (which probably doesn’t exist). So, when you set a ‘date’ filter, it includes the entirety of the date object, e.g. 2023-02-24 11:30:00 -0500. So if you have multiple rows that contain an event that occurs at 11:30 but each one on a different day, then only one of them will match the filter. If your filter only specifies the date but not the time, then it will default to midnight, which is likely why your filter tests fail.
However, one of the filter types is ‘any string’. So if you choose that instead of ‘any date value’, then you could enter 11:30 and each row containing that string would match the filter. Of course, ‘any date value’ can also be used to set a range that would encompass every hour of the day.
Hope this helps. You can also always reach out to support using ‘help > contact omni’.
