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Sorting inconsistency

Posted: Fri Oct 01, 2010 7:01 pm
by rocky63
I have a database of books in Bookpedia, including the field "Last Read". If I sort the database view of the Master List by "Last Read" the books appear in proper order.

I have made several smart collections with the criteria to include entries where "Last Read" "is" "2007" (for example).

The new smart collection will then contain (say) 12 books when the sorted master list has 30 books with "Last Read" being "2007".

If I manually re-enter the "Last Read" year for those not included in the smart collection, they will show up -- but not until the field has been retyped.

Any idea why this would happen?

rocky63

Re: Sorting inconsistency

Posted: Fri Oct 01, 2010 9:51 pm
by Conor
Last read is a date field that is specific to the day, although it might not be shown. Normally when you type in "2007" we translate that automatically to the first of January, hence as you enter the dates again your updating the day. The fix is to set your smart collection to be a range of dates from the beginning of the year to the end of that same year.

last read is after 31st december 2006
last read is before 1st January 2008
match all

Re: Sorting inconsistency

Posted: Fri Oct 01, 2010 10:12 pm
by rocky63
That did it.

I had set my date format in Preferences to %Y. Intending to have the field only hold the year.

And in the parameters for the smart collection I had, as I reported, set the criterion to "Last Read is 2006" for example.

Your suggestion didn't work until I went back to preferences and changed my date format to %d %b %Y.

I guess the key thing that I didn't remember was that if one enters only the year it gets saved as 1/1/year.

That might be an area for improving the program (and, no, I don't have a feel for how difficult that might be). But it would be nice to be able to use just a year and have it all work.

In any case, you response worked and I thank you for it.

Rocky63

Re: Sorting inconsistency

Posted: Sat Oct 02, 2010 4:30 am
by Conor
We try to standardize and when only the year is entered set the date to the first day of the year. As you mentioned it's possible for it to end up being something else and confuse those that are only displaying the year. Thank you for the feedback.