Search: datetime category column doesn't allow date search

[Yuan-yuan-Huang]

Is there an existing issue for this?

• I searched for a similar issue and didn't find a suitable one.

What is going wrong?

In the Manage search, we created a category variable e.g. Start time " Start date":

However, in the search column, it does the search as if this is the string variable, instead of datetime variable. For datetime variable, I would expect that we can search for the dataset that measured **_before or after specific date_**.

How is it supposed to work?

Is it possible that we can search dataset that was measure before or after some specific date?
E.g.

A user requested the ability to search for datasets that include data from specific years (e.g. 2006, 2010, and 2022). Currently, this is not straightforward to infer from the metadata. A desirable solution would be to enable filtering based on temporal coverage (start and end dates), allowing the system to automatically identify whether a dataset contains measurements from a given year or date.

How can it be reproduced?

No response

Do you get any exceptions?

No response

What kind of system do you use?

V.4.2.1

Which task(s) is/are related to this issue?

Data Search

[sventhiel]

I am not 100% sure. Need to check that. Probably it is mentioned in the metadata structure to be a string? And/Or it has a strange format auch that the system cannot transform it into a date.

[geofranzi]

If I remember correctly, for the primary data view, which is also a dynamic table, we send explicit information about the data type along with the data. I assume we do not do it for the search at the moment.

[Yuan-yuan-Huang]

I do not refer to the datetime columns in the primary data in this issue.
We also have the temporal coverage information in the metadata, i.e. start of the date and end of the date of the whole dataset. In the search function, I assume that we can search according to the metadata information. In the temporal coverage information in the metadata, it is datetime format:

[geofranzi]

The technical solution would be: Parse Text into a data object on the client side ...the challenge is this (explample from explos):

You cannot be sure that converting to a date object will work, since you may have a mixed date format. The question also would be: How to treat a year during sorting? 1.1.YYYY , 31.12.YYYY, middle of the year ...

It seems sorting by string is maybe much safer by the end of the day.