Test for month or day in date

mdyason · September 21, 2018

Back in 2011 and 2014 there was a discussion on this issue. Have there been any changes? (https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/11912/test-if-issued-date-contains-month-and-day)
I need to be able to style a date so that it will only show if the issued date contains a month or a day. In other words I want to suppress the date if all we have is a year. We need a year as the second field of the reference and then the full issued date at the end. But if its just a year, we do not want it again. Is there any way to achieve this in the latest CSL? Ideally I need to be able to put a datepart into an If statement. Otherwise any suggestions for workarounds will be most welcome.
We are not using a published style. I made one from scratch and this is something I can not figure out. I can make some unused field available to indicate a "Suppress date" but would then have to get this into many thousands of records across multiple document types.

Thank you

adamsmith · September 21, 2018

There's nothing new and this is indeed not possible, although a perfectly valid request. It's required for Chicago Manual citations, too. It's likely going to take some time to happen nevertheless, though, I'm afraid.

mdyason · September 21, 2018

Thank you so much for getting back to me. At least I now know its not just me.

bwiernik · September 22, 2018

Would it be possible to specify only the date-parts for month and day, which would then only show if they were present? Not sure exactly what the requirement is here?

adamsmith · September 22, 2018

This is the requirement:

We need a year as the second field of the reference and then the full issued date at the end. But if its just a year, we do not want it again.

This is exactly what Chicago author-date wants, e.g.

Clark, Melissa. 2012. “Cabbage Flexes Its Brawn Three Ways.” The New York Times, March 9, 2012, sec. Dining & Wine. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/14/dining/cabbage-flexes-its-brawn-three-ways.html.

But if you only have 2012 in the date field, Zotero gives you

Clark, Melissa. 2012. “Cabbage Flexes Its Brawn Three Ways.” The New York Times, 2012, sec. Dining & Wine. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/14/dining/cabbage-flexes-its-brawn-three-ways.html.

which makes no sense; you don't need the date twice.