In the Any historians around? thread, David CamelCase_data and I briefly addressed extended calendar support. It would indeed be worth the while to enter a product idea. The while of the Using Filemaker for Research User Group to show our interest, but perhaps it is also in FileMaker's interest. It seems (admittedly after not a lot of digging around) that such calendar support is mostly lacking in most database systems. It will not just gain a lot of attention from historians but also widen support for FMP in countries/cultures that use other civil calendars than the Gregorian. FMP already supports the Japanese Wareki dates, so perhaps extending to other calendars is not that much extra work for FM.
Since I am a historian of the 20th century, I am not very familiar with the existing calendar systems out there, nor what kind of functionality historians would want. Hence my request for your input. After a bit of wiki reading, I came up with at least the following
- support of Julian calendar
- support of BC dates in the Gregorian calendar
- translation support, i.e. some function or system that translates one calendar to the other
What else?
- do we want to request specific forms of support? I'm guessing an option to choose a calendar type in the options for a date or timestamp field, but perhaps there are better ways.
- which calendars before the Julian calendar?
- are there multiple formats for the Julian calendar, or any other calendar? Is it important to have those supported?
- can we be specific as to how we would like to have functions support different calendars?
- are there any specific visual aids that we would need, like the calendar picker?
- those who are familiar with FMP's support for the Wareki dates may have some useful evaluations of how FMP supports that calendar.
All replies and other issues that I have overlooked are most welcome
Great posting Frank van der Most - I've been meaning to write a similar post, but like you, my experience is a historian was really focused on the contemporary era in Western Europe/the Americas, where the the use of different calendars is not as wide-spread as elsewhere. So more detailed feedback from people with more experience in the subject matter would be great.
I totally agree that adding features like this would be an important competitive advantage for FileMaker.
I am perhaps less convinced that this is an "easy" change to do on the development side, though I guess that depends on exactly how you implement it.
What I would also find interesting as a complement to a well-thought-out and detailed feature request, is to do some kind of open source framework/shared code (as modular as possible) for how other calendars, and in general, other dates (approximate dates, etc) can be implemented in FileMaker as it stands today. That kind of work and the definition of the feature request would surely mutually benefit from each other.
I've got a few ideas for how this can be done, but once again, my expertise in the subject matter is a bit limited, but I'd be happy to pitch in to the extent I can.
If we could get a list of say the top 2-3 date-related challenges in FileMaker research databases, perhaps a few developers could get together on each problem, and see what they can come up with?
The Julian calendar and dates BCE do sound like a good place to start, and they should be relatively simple, but it would also be interesting to look at the details for some other calendars where the approach may be even more challenging.