[Gnumed-devel] GNUmed and 'imprecise' dates

[Busser, Jim]

The column information in

        
http://publicdb.gnumed.de/~ncq/gnumed/schema/gnumed_v18/gnumed-schema.html#blobs.table.doc-med

offered me spurious-seeming hope where, to the right of

        clin_when

it said in part

        'may be imprecise such as "7/99"'

and I even briefly believed it was too good to be true (which it appears it 
was) because -- despite that the GUI would permit me to truncate a date in the 
Document Sign/Edit dialog from the default

        2013-08-08 15:18:00

to

        2013-08

and despite that it did not complain when I thus saved the widget, it ended up 
that the day and time were saved anyway.

--> I think it is bad if the GUI is going to save a date and time that the user 
cannot see is being saved, since it may be wrong.

--> does support to accept '7/99' require a custom Domain Type as per

        http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gnumed-devel/2013-07/msg00146.html

and is it reasonable that such a type could be well-warranted for the clin_when 
which inherits from so many tables? Surely it would be better to let users 
enter the portion which is estimated with partial confidence (and, be being 
only partly completed, conveys that it is not 100% reliable) as opposed to 
unknown reliability or risk to let

        now()

be inputted as a fake placeholder which then itself risks to become confusing 
one or five years hence, when people wonder "oh … did the clin_when actually 
occur one or five years ago?"

-- Jim