Adding any date as a Topic Property

Ahh thankyou Rene, I see it now. However it is not very user friendly. I can't seem to enter a date manually by typing. Is scrolling through calendar screens the only way to enter data? I need to add dates that could go as far back as the 1940's, that's a hell of a lot of scrolling for each one.

Also i cannot seem to change the date format, it's only DD/MM/YYYY. Again am I missing something?

I've no idea what's going on with the MM24 online help. When I search on 'Topic Properties' there are 'no matching topics found'!!!

You can overtype date fields, but as René has pointed out, this only works for dates on or after 1st January 1970. It just ignores any keystrokes that would result in a year before 1970. This input method is almost unworkable.

I think the date format will follow the short date format configured in the Windows control panel.

Once again thankyou very much for the link to the previous discussion. This is obviously one of your pet subjects too.

I couldn't understand one your contributions in the the thread which was a screenshot of you using a 'Masked Field' type. Again in the absence of any help from MindMaanger Help, can I ask how this approach actually helps wih the problem? How is this any more useful than just simply using a Text field?

In a masked field, the purpose is to specify a predefined format, such as a date. This way, you don’t have to write it like in a regular text field. The input is predefined as day. month. year, and you can use years before 1970.

Going back to the original question, it’s important to note that while you can filter on dates in topic properties, you can’t perform any date arithmetic on them (for example, find the duration between two dates), nor can you link them to task info such as start or due date.

Thanks for pointing that out Alex. I don't want to in this instance, but it does seems strange to me that all the functionality that you can do with dates as a task (start, end etc.) is not available with dates in any other context.

In this scenario the date is that on which countries joined various international institutions (the UN etc.) and all I wanted to do (just to see if it was possible really ie. not a core feature of the map) was filter the map to show countries that had joined after a particuler date.

I guess if I really wanted to do that I could just record the year in which they joined as an integer I could filter the map that way. (It's just perfectionist me wants to record the full date seeing as how that is available from the original knowledge sources).

*MENTAL COGS TURN* I guess I could create that field but then hide it (but still filter on it)?

As I said not a deal breaker but I may have a look at doing that (but got lots more important stuff still to do on the map).

Thaks as ever for taking the time to repond.

Thanks Angus - and thanks to René also for pointing out the usefulness of masked field topic properties, which I've never really explored before.

For what it's worth, in addition to filtering you can also use SmartRules with both date-formatted and masked properties to either highlight specific date ranges and/or write to other topic properties. For example you set up a SmartRule to add the year to an integer field topic property if a date field or masked field contains that particular year (though how you set up the SmartRule trigger is a bit different for each type of field).