Re: [Gnumed-devel] Date formats (was allergy manager in CVS HEAD)

[Karsten Hilbert]

On Fri, Oct 17, 2008 at 12:42:38AM -0700, Jim Busser wrote:

>> Attached find a current screenshot of the allergy manager.
>> ...
>> Another screenshot shows the EMR tree. Note:
>
> The allergy manager expresses dates in the format 2008-08-28
>
> The EMR tree right hand panel expresses 17.09.2000
>
> What would be the best method by which to regularize the expression of 
> dates?

There is no really "best" method. The difficulty lies in
that some dates are formatted in the database, some are
formatted in Python and some may even be formatted in the
operating system.

When telling those data sources to format a date they
usually accept a format string. However, those format
strings are, again, of different requirements. Some accept
these format identifiers, others accept those. Some must be
unicode, others must not. Some format strings will be passed
through the translation layer (where they are at the whim of
the translator), some will not.

Yet another problem is how much precision to display where.

There is no straightforward, easy solution.

I do, of course, acknowledge the requirement of
disambiguation (not so much consistency - which helps a
great deal but is not *essential). Hence I suggest people
send requests for regularization on a case-by-case basis and
I will a) work on that on a case-by-case basis and b) see
how this lends itself to being abstracted out.

Karsten
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