Date Fields
There are two types of field for recording dates in Calm: Period Fields (such as the Date field in the Catalogue database) and Date fields (such as the ClosedUntil field in the Entry/Accession database).
Date fields pick up their display format from how Windows is set to show dates: e.g. 28/11/2004 (DD/MM/YYYY). You can only display dates in a Calm "date" field in this way. You may enter the current date by placing the cursor in the field and pressing the Insert key on your keyboard. Please note that the format in which the date appears is taken from your own system date, therefore it is the Regional Settings section in Windows Control Panel that specifies whether or not leading zeros are to be displayed in the days and months and whether the year is displayed as two digits or four e.g. 92 or 1992. If you change date settings in the Windows Control Panel, Calm will automatically change the format of dates in date fields in existing records. Please note that Calm date fields do not use the Long Date format that can be specified in Regional Settings.
Some date fields will be automatically completed by Calm, for example the Admin fields.
Period fields have a more flexible structure, a variety of formats of date are suitable including the following examples: “1914-1918”, “Early Twentieth Century” and “1920s”.
To handle other date formats, for example, "iron age" or "Neolithic", use the Periods authority file to define your own date ranges.
The content of Date and Period fields is validated by Calm; you will receive an error message if you try to save a record in which a Date or Period field contains invalid information, if the validation options are set in the Record drop down menu. A Period field validates both whether the date itself is valid but also whether or not the Calm date parser "understands" what the date format means eg. "June, July, August 1920" is a valid date but Calm will flag it as invalid because it cannot work out what the parameters of the date are (it can only accept two months in this format). For a Date field, if it is not in the format dd/mm/yyyy and it is flagged as invalid, you have the option to correct it. If you choose not to correct it, Calm will attempt to correct it using a "best fit" check. If it cannot reasonably try and match the date it will delete the contents of the field as it has failed validation.