[Gnumed-devel] Date expression (formatting)

[Jim Busser]

was Re: [Gnumed-devel] Post-bootstrap questions, including client feedback 0.4.6-1

On 22-Jun-09, at 12:18 PM, Karsten Hilbert wrote:

7) how is the format of the GNUmed client display of dates controlled? 

Usually by explicit formatting, in most places using "%x".

I think that we can, and should (must?) do better than the "Locale's appropriate" date representation. Even if we set aside that Canada

(05/08/09)

is sometimes dominated by US-formatted software

(08/05/09)

I would point out that, to my awareness, it is presently the month of June, not the month of "6" or "06" and it is much easy and less error prone to see and understand an event from May as being one month ago than to have to "compute" that an event from the month of "05" was one month ago. While there exists a counter argument -- namely that a current month display as "06" assists to recognize that an event from "03" was three months ago, you have to know that "06" is "now", and it is not natural. Likewise, an actual character (abbreviated) month name assists communication with the patient, for example:

this problem we are discussing was active last October...

we do not say "was active in month 10"

QED?

If yes, a *clinically* suitable date format can be assembled from the following python "directives":

%d %b %Y

which yield (for example)

28 Jun 2001

and the user could potentially configure somewhere their preferred sequence as

dd Mmm YYYY

or

Mmm dd YYYY

or

YYYY Mmm dd

and I would further favor that future dates (such as appointments, test dates) include the day of the week directive (%a) to reduce scheduling confusion and errors and to assist the patients to be aware that a certain day of the week poses a conflict:

%a = Locale's abbreviated weekday name e.g. Thu for Thursday

Will it be feasible in some future version of GNUmed for current date _expression_ %x to be replaced with the python equivalent of

if date < today

user-configured sequence among %d %b %Y

else

user-configured sequence among %a %d %b %Y

leaving only some default to be decided? I appreciate that it would depend on the ability to raise the user-configured values wherever a date display will be required, but I do believe it would be important to make GNUmed a "quality" software and I think we do care about the quality.

--> wishlist for 0.7 (i.e. after 0.6) ??

The range of options available to us is here:

http://docs.python.org/library/time.html

(see strftime)

%x, in turn, is governed by the platforms ability to

communicate LC_TIME to Python.