Upgrade Storagedate formats
I've been searching the forums and have found many comments, but am not sure which information is reliable and current or the best way to fix this.
In my shared group library, there are different items with m.d.y and others with d.m.y. Maybe that's due to the settings of different people who have added. In the list, dates are displayed as they were entered, but they still sort correctly. This is very confusing.
How can I have a consistent date format for all of my items? I don't really care what it is, as long as it displays consistently and I don't need to constantly correct dates for items that other people have added. As a side note, if I could choose, it would be DD.MM.YYYY
In my shared group library, there are different items with m.d.y and others with d.m.y. Maybe that's due to the settings of different people who have added. In the list, dates are displayed as they were entered, but they still sort correctly. This is very confusing.
How can I have a consistent date format for all of my items? I don't really care what it is, as long as it displays consistently and I don't need to constantly correct dates for items that other people have added. As a side note, if I could choose, it would be DD.MM.YYYY
But is there really no way to view a list of my entire library and see them all in the same date format? Otherwise, when I click on sort and there are DD.MM and MM.DD dates mixed together, it appears that they're actually not sorted. This drives me crazy because I have to go through the entire list and look at the detail view to verify that the date is entered correctly or not. And on those detail views, it's not sufficient to just have all be in the same date format. I need to read carefully to learn which date format was assigned to each item and then verify that it's correct. For the project that I'm working on now, I can still remember what's 4.8 or 8.4, but in a year from now I might not remember anymore what was correct.
It's also especially a concern for collaborative libraries. Someone with a system setting of MM.DD may read the library list and see that all dates appear to be in DD.MM. Then that person would create many additional entries all in DD.MM, even when their local system settings are in MM.DD. So this would then result in them entering the dates incorrectly. I've already caught this error several times from my colleagues.
This kind of user behavior makes sense because nearly all online forms require the user to enter dates in a particular format, not according to their own system settings. Also excel has a single date format per column and it's displayed consistently.
By when do you think this change will be implemented? From the forum posts, it seems like it's been discussed already for quite some time. I'd prefer an intuitive solution instead of needing to constantly remind our team to double-check their system date settings and to enter them in that way in Zotero.
There's no way to identify items with extra date parts through the UI at the moment, but here's a script you can run in the Run JavaScript window:
var items = await Zotero.Items.getAll(Zotero.Libraries.userLibraryID, true);var pairs = items.map(item => {
var date = item.getField('date', false, true);
if (!date) return false;
var parsed = Zotero.Date.strToDate(date);
if (!parsed.part) return false;
return [item.key, item.getDisplayTitle(), date];
})
.filter(x => x);
return pairs;
(This is for your personal library. Doing it in a group library would require a little adjustment.)
Best,
I hope in a new update custom date formats (like YYYY-MM-DD) be included.
Same!
So, choosing "English (UK)" as your language in Zotero settings will give you "MM-DD-YYYY" dates, but there still seems to be no way of getting ISO dates without a plugin (and I think installing a plugin just for that is a bit overkill, especially when the plugin is designed to modify several other aspects of Zotero too. But thanks to northword, for mentioning those plugins).