Enter dates

Find guidelines for entering dates and formatting rules for date data fields.

Enter dates in the Item Editing tab, the Project Spreadsheet, or the Metadata Templates. Dates can also be entered in a tab-delimited text file. Your administrator may choose to configure the date field as a Date data type to keep the integrity of the date format to support accurate sorting and date range searching. If this has been configured in the collection field properties, there are some guidelines and formatting rules for entering dates.

Note: A Search by Date option is available on the Advanced Search pane if one or more collections contain a searchable date data type field.

Checking Date type

When setting field properties for a collection, the administrator may choose to set the Date field as a Date type.

To check if your Date field has a Date type:

In the Project Client, open the Project Settings Manager and choose Metadata Templates. Click Edit for each of the templates you are using.
Check whether the default type for the Date field is set for Date.

Guidelines for entering dates

Month values must be between 1 and 12.

Dates must be valid for the given month and year. For instance, a date in February cannot be greater than 28 except in leap years when the date cannot be greater than 29, while a date in March cannot be greater than 31.
The year must be shown with four digits. If you enter two digits, the Project Client adds two zeros before the entered numbers. For instance, if you enter 94 for the date, the Project Client changes the year to 0094.
If entering a year range when the metadata fields are set up as date data type, enter YYYY-YYYY. CONTENTdm expands the entry so that all years within the range are displayed and stored in the Date data type field. The YYYY-YYYY range formatting will be automatically converted to a list of semi-colon delimited YYYY values.
- If the metadata fields are set up as text data type, the expanded dates when a YYYY-YYYY value is entered will not occur when editing in Project Client as the YYYY-YYYY format is considered valid for text data type. If the metadata fields are set up as date data type, the individual dates will expand when entering a YYYY-YYYY value in the field in Project Client.

Note: Data type text metadata fields have fewer formatting restrictions than data type date metadata fields. When a field is updated from text to date data type, the formatting of values in these fields might be considered improperly formatted. In Project Client, the YYYY-YYYY range formatting will be automatically converted to a list of semi-colon delimited YYYY values. In CONTENTdm Administration, a pop-up will result when saving the metadata in an object that contains an unsupported format. The metadata will need to up updated manually. Object metadata can be updated either in CONTENTdm Administration or by importing the object into Project Client.

Formatting rules

When importing dates to a Date data type field, they must be valid dates in the following supported formats:

Supported Formats	YYYY-MM-DD YYYY-MM YYYY MM/DD/YYYY MM/YYYY YYYY-YYYY	2009-01-01 2009-01 2009 11/30/2008 11/2008 2008-2009
Supported delimiters between dates	Comma (,) and semicolon (;)	2008, 2009 2008; 2009
Leading spaces are okay but not required when using multiple dates	YYYY; YYYY; YYYY YYYY;YYYY;YYYY	2007; 2008; 2009 2007;2008;2009

After dates are added to the Project Spreadsheet, they will be displayed in a yyyy-mm-dd format.