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wrichards

Filter for "Dates" bug

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When trying to created a filter for a for a report and selecting the "Date" field the choice of operators includes "Contains '?' " and "Does Not Contain '?' ". When you select either one you are not given a choice to enter a value. The value is set to ? or I suppose no ?. The same thing happens in the Project Explorer if your select an "Any Event" and a Subfield of "Date". If you try to filter on any other field which allows an operator of Contains or Does Not Contain there is no question mark and you are allowed to enter the value for which you are searching.

 

In short any time you select "Date" in the Field or Subfield the Contains is followed by a question mark and you cannot enter any value.

 

I cannot see any purpose to have a "contains" option and no ability to enter a value so I assume it is a bug.

 

Bill Richards

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Hi, Bill,

 

I can understand that this filter can be confusing. This filter is to identify those dates which actually contain the question mark character ('?'). Any form of a date can optionally end in a question mark, and this will find such dates. It is not a filter where you can specify some arbitrary content. Most date operators are limited to specifying a range for regular dates. And since you can filter on each part of a regular date, you can find, for example, all dates where the month equals January. If the date is irregular, the only filter available is to identify those dates which are irregular. There is no filter to find an irregular date which contains some specific text. For this reason I usually put irregular dates in a split memo part, where I can filter for text that "contains" some value.

 

Hope this helps explain,

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That still doesn't explain why the operator "contains" only allows a value of ?. You should be able to select a value for any of the date modifiers such as before, after, say, between, etc. and not be limited to select all modifiers. If you are allowed to enter values, you still have the option to enter ?. If this is not a bug than it is something that should be corrected.

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But you are still misreading this particular operator, Bill. The operator is "contains ?". The question mark character is part of the operator. This particular operator ONLY searches for question marks, nothing else. It is NOT a general purpose "contains" operator. There is no general purpose "contains" operator for dates. This operator is doing the very limited action it is intended to do.

 

Sorry if I was unclear.

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As a separate response you mentioned: "You should be able to select a value for any of the date modifiers such as before, after, say, between, etc. and not be limited to select all modifiers." Yes, that would be nice to have, but there is no such operator. The only three operators that currently exist for modifiers of dates are: "contains ?" for finding dates with a question mark, and "Has Modifier" and "Has No Modifier" for finding dates modified with one of the seven possible modifiers.

 

Several of us users have "wished" for an additional operator which could locate a specific date modifier, but that wish has not yet been granted. It seems clear that you would also "wish" for such an operator. Unfortunately, there is not a bug here, there is simply a missing but desired feature.

 

Hope this makes things clearer,

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It just seems strange that most other fields have an operator of "Contains" or "Does Not Contain" and allow you to enter a value. It is only the Date field that has the limitation of "Contains ?" or "Does Not Contain ?". I would think the Date field should have the same operators as other fields.

 

As I mentioned on the TMG mailing list I am looking for all dates that contain "Say" because when I imported my data to TMG years ago all modifiers were changed to "Say" and I was tring to correct those. I did print a list some time ago and thought I was able to do it with an earlier version of TMG. I seem to have lost the list and was tring to recreate it. I was able to do so using TMGU so my problem is solved. There were 54 modifier with "Say", rather than the 1250 I got using "All Modifiers".

 

I appreciate your comments and maybe the developers will read this list and grant our "wish"

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