[Gnumed-devel] Clinicians: document content date in archive

[Karsten Hilbert]

Hello all,

we allow the user to associate a point in time with any
document in our archive. This field is later used for quick
visual selection of the relevant documents a doctor is
looking for, eg "8/2001 neurological discharge letter" where
the "8/2001" is the part coming from the date field.

Currently, this field is free text such as not to constrain
whatever precision of date is known, eg 2001, 8/2001,
2001/8/27, 2001/8/27 @ 15:22:33 are all possible inputs.
However, "total crap" is valid input, too, currently, which
does not lend itself to useful post-processing.

Making it a real timestamp isn't really an option due to
medical realities.

I am not sure about the stability of Ian's attempt at a
fuzzy timestamp type.

So, what do people think we should allow as input in terms
of string parsing. I am thinking of (d=digit):

 dddd - year
 d/dddd or dd/dddd - month/year
 dddd/dd/dd - year/month/day
 dddd/dd/dd hh:mm:ss - year/month/day hour:minutes:seconds

Do you think this will suffice ?

Karsten
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