Date formatting

[Ortwin]

Besides other things I use UR to track sales activities - I want to collect all related activites for one customer in one place.
One step here is taking call notes: in a special subfolder I want to create an item for every call (phone call, visit, whatever). Title should be the date. In the subfolder notes should be sorted chronologically.

Here it starts: Inserting a new item with ALT-Z works great. But ALT-Z takes the standart windows formatting for a short date. If I take that format (here in Germany DD.MM.YY) i won't get a properly sorted list. Changing that to YY.MM.DD, so that the sorting works, rendered my windows quite unusable: every program which uses a date (like Explorer e.g.) uses the short form and is not readable any more ;-(

Therefor I need the possibility to format the date-string ALT-Z uses in a special way, which means I'd like to have the possibility to define a formatting string of my own in Tools->Options->Miscellaneous.

[kinook]

We'll consider this request.

For now, if you uncheck 'Tools | Options | Trees | Alphabetically sort when adding children to new items', insert (into a node without children or in an existing sorted node after moving an item up/down) will insert in chronological order, and the Date Created attribute will have the actual creation date+time.

[quant]

Originally posted by Ortwin
Besides other things I use UR to track sales activities - I want to collect all related activites for one customer in one place.
One step here is taking call notes: in a special subfolder I want to create an item for every call (phone call, visit, whatever). Title should be the date. In the subfolder notes should be sorted chronologically.

Here it starts: Inserting a new item with ALT-Z works great. But ALT-Z takes the standart windows formatting for a short date. If I take that format (here in Germany DD.MM.YY) i won't get a properly sorted list. Changing that to YY.MM.DD, so that the sorting works, rendered my windows quite unusable: every program which uses a date (like Explorer e.g.) uses the short form and is not readable any more ;-(

Therefor I need the possibility to format the date-string ALT-Z uses in a special way, which means I'd like to have the possibility to define a formatting string of my own in Tools->Options->Miscellaneous.

The names of the items is string variable, the same as is the filename in windows, and as such can be sorted only alphabetically. If you want to get sorted by whatever date format you use, just add the attribute 'date' to your notes (you can also create form), add this attribute to your child view pane, and you can sort it there (it remembers the sorting). This is the same as in windows' explorer menu. I understand that UR could do sorting by attribute directly in tree, but all you need is already there. Moreover, the advantage of having your data as the attribute rather than the string pretending to be a date is that UR does the sanity check (dates are consistent, ie you cannot insert date with 32 days), and you can do date comparisons, ... no matter what format you use now or if you change it for whatever reason later, all will work. The attribute thing and saved searches it the most powerful feature is UR, learn how to use it, and you will see how much you can do ...

Dont try to use string for date (or string for number, or number for date, ...), if there is native data format, that is efficient database management course 101 ;-)
You will get rewarded later, you'll see ...

[quant]

I added a short example how I would manage it.

To add a new customer, just go to Customers/Data and press Insert and Change name of the customer

To add new call info for a certain Customer, just go to Customer/Data/Call Notes and press Insert, you can leave the name "call note (n)", just click on the form to get the current date/time. (forms are available only in Beta Version 3)

Everything is totally customizable. For the customer, in the Data directory, you can see all the call notes in the child pane sorted ...
In the Search directory, you can see what the next action, and current status for each customer is ...

[Ortwin]

@quant

thanks for trying to help me and teach me UR ;-) (no offense intended!) and for the time you invested to nearly recreate my own .urd file.

But the point is not (only) to sort the notes, but to have the dates in the explorer - and later on in a printed report (sigh! I would not need it but my customer ...) I want to see the date upfront in the explorer and not in the attributes, when I click in the item.

The create (or modify) date attributes do not suffice, because I quite often enter the data some days later (e.g. after a trip or so).

You are absolutely right about dates and strings, I fully agree, but we are not dealing with a classical DB here - for me that was the reason to buy UR. I like the flexibility to do something on the fly.
I am doing databases for nearly 30 years now (that was back then when we had only 'tables' and no 'relations' ;-) and on the other hand used Lotus Agenda and EccoPro a lot. The biggest problem always was to transfer your valuable data to the next program.

The challenge today is that nearly all programs are so feature-rich, you need a long time to get to know what they offer, and what not. And today I don't have the time to read a complete manual. You search what you need when you need it. I know it sounds ignorant, but thats reality. Who agrees?

Anyhow I learned some things from your example, especially in the searches. I don't search a lot - yet.
Which brings me to some other suggestions: true inheritance of attributes to child nodes, an external database for icons and templates and ...
But more about that later.