entering dates 'partially'

[uscitizen]

a potential user of an application i've been developing (in '97) was hoping that dates could be entered partially. she tells me that in her clinic, patients cannot always be counted to know when something happened, e.g. a patient may remember that they had surgery in 1966 but not the month and day; or a patient may know the month and year of an event but not the day.

short of leaving a field blank, or instructing the user to use the 6/15th as the month and day of a 'year only known' (and the 15th of the month when just the month and year is known), does access provide a facility for handling this scenario?

 

[JeremyNYC]

No. There are two ways I can think of to deal with this. One is to store the date in three fields, using null to indicate that you don't know. The other is to use a date field and a field that stores either "Accurate" or "Estimated". I just did this in a database for a client of mine, and it seems to be working out OK so far. (Actually it stores a 1 or a 2, and I've got a mini lookup table for that, because I use it for every date field in every table in the database).

Jeremy

==
Jeremy Wallace
AlphaBet City Dataworks

http://www.ABCDataworks.com

Affordable Development, Professionally Done

Please post in the appropriate forum with a descriptive subject; code and SQL, if referenced; and expected results. See thread181-473997 for more pointers.

 

[uscitizen]

thanks for the contribution.....i'd thought of the tri-partite approach but decided against it (for computational reasons) and am probably going to implement the 'fuzzy' angle (which my user has suggested themselves)

and the beat goes on.....

 

[LarryDeLaruelle]

USCitizen:

Another approach, if you are not going to use the field for any date-type calculations, would be to use a text type instead of a date type.

This would allow the user to enter the data as you describe.

HTH

Larry De Laruelle
ldelaruelle@familychildrenscenter.org

 

[uscitizen]

yeah, i know, it's kinda cruel but that won't work for us (because they just might do some computations which use it).
thanks for the thoughts guys