Date and Time 3

Date and Time provides advanced date and time management for Symphony. It offers an easy interface providing a calendar widget that helps creating multiple dates and date ranges. The field respects the system settings and displays date and time accordingly. Nevertheless, it is capable to read and understand relative date formats.

Installation

Information about installing and updating extensions can be found in the Symphony documentation at http://www.getsymphony.com/learn/.

Updating

To update Date and Time to a newer version perform the following steps:

• Make sure that you have a working backup of your Symphony install.
• Update the Date and Time folder by either updating the repository and submodule or by replacing the files manually.
• Log into the backend and enable the Date and Time extension to run the update script.

All interface related components of Date and Time are JavaScript based. Please make sure to clear your browser cache to avoid interface issues. If another extension or the Symphony core throws a JavaScript error, Date and Time will stop working.

Field Settings

Date and Time offers the following field settings:

• allow creation of new items: this will add a Create New button to the interface
• allow sorting of items: this will enable item dragging and reordering
• allow time editing: this will display date and time in the interface
• allow date ranges: this will enable range editing
• pre-populate this field with today’s date: this will automatically add the current date to new entries

Field Behaviour

General

• Clicking the date input will open the calendar.
• Clicking on a day in the calendar will either select or update the date.
• Clicking outside the field will close all calendars.
• If enabled, dragging dates will sort the date listing.

Date ranges

• Clicking either the start or end date input will open the calendar showing the selected date.
• Clicking on a date in the calendar will either select or update the date.
• Hitting the tab key in the start input will create a range an jump to the end date.
• Clicking on a day in the calendar will either select or update a single date.
• Clicking on a day in the calendar while holding down shift will create a day range.

Times

• Clicking on a time will set start and end date to the same time.
• Clicking on a time while holding down shift will create a time range.

Data Source Filtering

• prefixing a filter with start: will only check start dates,
• prefixing a filter with end: will only check end dates,
• prefixing a filter with strict: will check, if start and end date are in the given filter range,
• filters without prefixes will check, if start or end date are in the given filter range.
• prefixing a filter with extended: will work like the unprefixed filter but will treat single dates as an “open range”, starting with the given date but never ending.

Filters separated by comma will find all dates that match one of the given dates or ranges.
Filters separated by + will only find dates that match all of the given dates or ranges.

This extensions accepts all relative dates known to PHP’s DateTime class for filtering. It also allows the creation of filter ranges with to or earlier than and later than.

Example Data Source Output

<date-and-time>
    <date timeline="1" type="range">
        <start iso="2011-12-06T10:00:00+01:00" time="10:00" weekday="2" offset="+0100">2011-12-06</start>
        <end iso="2011-12-24T18:00:00+01:00" time="18:00" weekday="6" offset="+0100">2011-12-24</end>
    </date>
    <date timeline="2" type="exact">
        <start iso="2011-12-25T09:00:00+01:00" time="09:00" weekday="7" offset="+0100">2011-12-25</start>
    </date>
</date-and-time>

Acknowledgement

This extension is not a work of a single person, a lot of people tested it and contributed to it. The initial layout of the date widget was inspired by Scott Hughes’ calendar mock-up for Symphony 2.0 and Rowan Lewis’ calendar overlay.