[chaley]

Originally Posted by Kythe42

I don't suppose there's a way to change the order of these fields that I'm not currently aware of?

Yes. See the tweak "Order of custom column(s) in edit metadata (ID: metadata_edit_custom_column_order)"

Originally Posted by Kythe42

Well this is exactly what I want, so therefore I'm not able to do it in a format of my choosing. I honestly don't understand why this isn't possible. Didn't Calibre used to be able to do this, or am I crazy?

I am the developer that did custom date columns, and IIRC for the 3 years I have worked on calibre there never was a way to enter dates using pull downs. Basically it can't work because in calibre a date must be a valid date, with all components having valid values. We can hide some of them and make up valid values for the ones that are hidden, but we cannot allow empty values for any date component.

Perhaps I should make a suggestion to the developers about this since I consider the ability to enter a partial date when needed to be an important function.

Won't happen for the reasons I noted above.

I just think that it's insane to need 4 fields(3 for the date and 1 composite column) in order to do full dates when I know them, but let me do partial dates when I only know partial dates, especially when I want to use multiple date fields(at least two and possibly as many as four).

You can do it in two fields, one text field with the date components in a known order and another composite column that "does the right thing" if components are missing. The following screen capture shows what I mean. "mytext" is the text column with dates entered yyyy/mm/dd. It is sortable because the components are in order of significance (y/m/d). "comp2" is the composite column that shows the partial date in whatever format you want.


The following shows the template for the composite column. It parses the values from the text field, then constructs dates using different date formats and values by checking if any of the fields are missing.