Would like to contribute to add a "Date" column to the list view

pyraminds

Hi all!

I'm reading papers in a field where the state of the art is changing fast enough that I want to be able to sort by year and date.

Today you can sort by the "Year" field, but I notice many PDFs have the "Date" metadata in them.

This means I could easily update all my papers with the "Date" metadata, but I can't see at glance if one was in Jan 2016 vs Dec 2016 (very different!)

Wondering how easy this would be for me to add. Can anyone point to where in the code I might start digging around? Happy to help.

dstillman

Right-click on the column header to add/remove columns.

(Note that Year still sorts by the full date, even though it doesn't display it.)

pyraminds

Hm the second part of what you're saying doesn't seem to be true.

I consistently see that while it sorts correctly by year, it does not sort by month.

ie: Date=2020-07-22 is sorted before 2020-02-18

when sorting by Date ascending. How can I help fix this?

dstillman

Sorry, I was misremembering that part. Year used to sort by the full date, but we changed that many years ago.

pyraminds

I would be happy to help add this again. it seems like the correct behavior

how can I add the code for this?

dstillman

No — as I say, and as you can read in the linked thread, this was an intentional change.

pyraminds

but this doesn’t make any sense, unless i’m missing something. why would you want the secondary sort to be by author name?

if you did want to only sort by year (not month) the workaround us to just keep the year in the Date field, as the poster in that thread mentions:

> “ Ah yes. That´s it! Thank you. If I replace the exact dates with just "2000" (which is sufficient for me), then the first author is indeed the second criterion.”

to me, if I select sort by “Date” and it doesn’t sort by date, that’s … a bug

i’m curious - what’s the reason in your mind to keep it that way? is there any way I can achieve sorting by date?

dstillman

What? We're talking about the Year column. The Date column sorts by the full date.

pyraminds

doh! you're right. I was using the Year column. Date one works great

thanks for all your work on Zotero - love it!