Trouble Creating Dates in Meta Data Field

[farouche]

I’m writing a novel that spans a considerable period of time and uses some flashbacks. I wanted to create a Collection that is in chronological order b/c the novel itself is not told in a straight linear fashion.

I’ve created the collection and moved some of the documents from the binder into it. In my custom meta data, I created a field called Year so that I can keep track . I set up (or tried to set up) a custom date format so that I would get the month and year. I need all 4 digits of the year b/c some dates are in the 1800s and some are in the 1900s. (I used MMM YYYY).

However, I will type in a date and it keeps being changed to a different date. For example, Apr 1894 keeps being changed to Dec 1890. I have this issue whether I’m in the binder looking at the meta data or trying to edit it in the Collection.

I don’t understand what the problem is. Never had this issue until version 3 when the calendar icon also shows up in the data field.

ETA: Tried deleting the custom metadata date field – though okay, I’ll just do it as text instead of date. But what’s interesting is that although I deleted ALL custom metadata fields, they show up in the sidebar as blank space, including the former date one with the little icon calendar. So how do I get rid of that? It’s like shadow data.

Help.

[AmberV]

I don’t understand what the problem is. Never had this issue until version 3 when the calendar icon also shows up in the data field.

You would have been using a plain-text field in version 2, there were no other metadata field types back then. Version 3 adds a date type, which should work for most standard date formats, but that’s something I advised in the manual itself: if your date format doesn’t work, consider using regular text.

That said, you might be able to tweak your date format a bit and get this working, if you want. My guess is going to be that it works better with numbers than plain-language month names. Four-digit years should work fine. I use them all of the time with my simple standard format: 2018-12-17.

ETA: Tried deleting the custom metadata date field – though okay, I’ll just do it as text instead of date. But what’s interesting is that although I deleted ALL custom metadata fields, they show up in the sidebar as blank space, including the former date one with the little icon calendar. So how do I get rid of that? It’s like shadow data.

I don’t know what that is about. There shouldn’t be anything left under the Custom Metadata section of the inspector if you deleted all fields, just the button to set up new ones. Maybe you have found a glitch though, I’d at first try reloading the project. If that doesn’t work, reset its interface settings.