Set filter as a date range - date picker not working
My users need to be able to set a date range and filter the whole dataset for that range - tables, graphs, everything. Date picker from the dashboard bundle seems like the right choice, but this seems to have some issues. Mainly, as soon as I pick the first date - which is most likely in 2011 - the second date jumps to that same date. The right search bar seems nunfunctional, so all I can do is click the right arrow until I find the end date I am looking for. Which is a nightmare, when you look for numbers from, let's say, 12.12.2012 till 01.01.2023, for example.
Either I find a way to make the date range picker work as expected or I give my users another option to pick their dates.
There's no great way of selecting dates when the ranges can cross 10+ years, I'd say. You could have two individual date pickers, on island tables, and then use a button to select the actual date range based on those two selections. That said, you give an example of selecting 12.12.2012 to 01.01.2023, but if the second date defaults to today, and you wanted 12.12.2012 to 13.12.2012, you'd have to do a lot of scrolling the opposite way...
If your users are savvy, you can have them use a regular filter and teach them how to type out the range using > and <. If most of your ranges are based on whole years or months, you can have a Year and Month field rather than just a Date field. You could also consider a third-party date extension, such as the one in Vizlib Library, which may offer better options insofar as what you can do with calendar-based objects.
As far as I know, the start date for the selection will almost always be the same. Let's just assume that is good enough for now.
What if I hard define the start date and let the users only the end date? It would still cover more than 10 years in most cases, but this way I maybe can avoid using the date picker and go for a different approach. What would the right way to go be then?
Can I pre-fill the filter box for the date with ">startdate<"? Is there a more elegant solution?
In that scenario you would have two options - one is to have one selected date and use that in a set analysis (rather than selecting on the actual date field), and the other would be a button-based approach as I suggested in my previous post, where users select a single date on an island table and then use a button to apply that selection to the actual date field. I would recommend the second approach, as the first approach can be confusing to users (since it does not populate Available/Alternative/Excluded based on the actual date range).
It might also be worth considering that if you always want your period to start with a set date, e.g. 12.12.2012, you could just avoid pulling data that is older than said date in your script, in which case users could just filter using e.g. <01.01.2023.
