Make birth date EASY

[Pablo]

Hi!

We have a date field for birth date inside Contacts. Works great.

However, when users assign the birth year, they need to "navigate" a LOT (using the calendar popup) from today's year to the contact's birth year.

We have thought of a few solutions but haven't found a way to set them:

1. Have the birth date as a varchar field with masking (DD/MM/YYYY).
2. Set the default of the birth date to 01/01/1990 (closest year to most of the contact's birth year).
3. Create 3 integer field (day, month and year). However, we are avoiding this option.

Anyone has tested a simpler way to create a birth date?

Thanks a lot!

[espcrm]

However, when users assign the birth year, they need to "navigate" a LOT (using the calendar popup) from today's year to the contact's birth year.

I don't get it, wouldn't they just type it in? Clicking the "Month" at the top will change it into Year Mode, then to Decade Mode. This seem to be the normal way all Calendar is made as a standard if not minimum requirement. I haven't seen an alternative to the UI for calendar yet.

Perhaps adding a few button where you can quickly go to the relevant 'common' year might make it a bit quicker but I highly doubt it will be in the official version.

Now the date kinda suck, you are forced to type in the day, month and year, due to date validation it won't let you save otherwise, which is fine for data 'quality' but sometime you don't know the year but you might know the month or date/month.

You might be able to dig into the coding to disable this validation though. As for your varchar field, don't bother, I did that for about 2 months and I couldn't use the Filter properly, nor can I use formula and PDF printing for it properly so I end up having to use the date field and slowly moved the varchar over.

I would say the integer will be the same issue.

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How can we do this better? Take shortcut where you can I suppose, I written a post in the Learning thread (I think) about my experience with date and calendar: https://forum.espocrm.com/forum/gene...crm-and-design
Basically you can be lazy in certain way. One pet peeve is you still have to write the full year where most other system assume you mean within this century or so, for example writing 1/1/95 mean year 1995, 1/1/02 mean year 2002, whereas EspoCRM went, "nope" you must mean year 00095 and 0002,

As for your navigation, I have yet to see this yet (might be full much popup for most people liking): click Calendar show all 12 months on your screen rather than single month. A few button that give you 'shortcut' to frequent common year.

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After all this, I don't have any suggestion for a better way though, currently I just "deal" with it sadly.

[Pablo]

Hi espcrm ,

Thanks for your help.

You are right, there's no easy way right now. My best bet was the varchar field with masking (DD/MM/YYYY) but I will keep searching.

Thanks again for your time!