Bug 161393 - Allow typing a date directly into the ad-hoc field when creating a custom document property with Date format
Summary: Allow typing a date directly into the ad-hoc field when creating a custom doc...
Status: NEW
Alias: None
Product: LibreOffice
Classification: Unclassified
Component: LibreOffice (show other bugs)
Version:
(earliest affected)
unspecified
Hardware: All All
: medium enhancement
Assignee: Not Assigned
URL: https://listarchives.libreoffice.org/...
Whiteboard:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks: File-Properties
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Reported: 2024-06-03 15:18 UTC by Luc Rochat
Modified: 2024-06-20 07:29 UTC (History)
4 users (show)

See Also:
Crash report or crash signature:


Attachments
KDE date picker (90.30 KB, image/png)
2024-06-20 07:29 UTC, Heiko Tietze
Details

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Description Luc Rochat 2024-06-03 15:18:49 UTC
Description:
When you create a custom document property of type "Date", a widget appears offering 3 years. If you want to enter a date from one or more centuries back, this is totally impractical. The best would be to be able to type a date directly into the ad-hoc field.

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Open the document properties
2.Create a customized property
3.Select type Date


Actual Results:
A widget that is too closed is displayed.

Expected Results:
It should be possible to enter a date manually in the field.


Reproducible: Always


User Profile Reset: No

Additional Info:
Give the option of using the widget or manually typing a date in the "Date" field.
Comment 1 Stéphane Guillou (stragu) 2024-06-03 15:35:50 UTC
Confirmed that this widget makes it very impractical to pick a year far from the default date. It applies to the win and gen VCL plugins. The same widget is used in e.g. the date content control.
The gtk3 widget is different in that it does not limit to picking a year from a list of 3.

So I think there's two issues:
- the widget is impractical in its current state
- the field should allow entering a date by hand

Modern versions of such date pickers are often designed to allow both entering a date by hand, while switching between increasingly large time ranges like decades with the pointer. See for example Shiny's Date widget: https://shiny.posit.co/r/gallery/widgets/widget-gallery/
Comment 2 Heiko Tietze 2024-06-04 09:20:28 UTC
Date picker are a popular topic for UI/UX designer and you find a large number of guides, example, tutorials etc. in the Internet. And funny examples for bad usability.

I support the idea of a direct input with simple verification.
Comment 3 Cor Nouws 2024-06-19 17:13:18 UTC
nice improvement!
Comment 4 Heiko Tietze 2024-06-20 07:26:39 UTC
We discussed the topic in the design meeting.

Typical date picker allow to enter the date directly or per widget that has three states: day, month, year toggled per click on the year or via tabs. Alternatively we may also just allow direct input and verify the input on-the-fly via regular expression.

The datepicker control is not only relevant on the document properties but also for form controls (Form > Content Controls > Date Control). Cannot find a duplicate report but another place where such a datepicker might become handy is Calc requested in bug 108088.

The class SwDateContentControlButton could be a start point. Easy hackable, Hossein?
Comment 5 Heiko Tietze 2024-06-20 07:29:12 UTC
Created attachment 194845 [details]
KDE date picker

(In reply to Heiko Tietze from comment #4)
> ...or via tabs.

Many other UI approaches can be found on the Internet, for example see comment 1.