[Form] Support format without "y", "M" or "d" in DateField

[webmozart]

DateField should support formats that don't contain the letters "y", "M" or "d" in order to select partial dates (e.g. months). The default values of the fields, when left away, should be the corresponding parts of the UNIX base timestamp 1970-01-01.

Example:

$builder->add('expires_at', 'date', array(
    'format' => 'MMyyyy',
));

A date submitted here will always have day "1", e.g. "2013-02-01".

Further related work:

TimeType currently supports the "with__" options for achieving this functionality (including or excluding single parts of the time). We should think about deprecating the "with__" options and supporting a "format" option instead, if this improves consistency.

[Tobion]

I think the value of a left out part should be the current date, i.e. the current year instead of arbitrary 1970.

[acasademont]

+1 for the fix but agree with @Tobion if I am working only with months and days, the year should default to the current year.

[webmozart]

So if you leave away the month, it should default to the current month? And if I leave away the seconds, to the current seconds?

Exactly this has been changed in b20c5ca.

[acasademont]

ah great! thx @bschussek

[webmozart]

So just to clarify, the default value for any field not given will be

Field	Default
year	1970
month	01
day	01
hour	00
minute	00
second	00

The alternative would be to always default to the current value of that field (current year, current month etc.) but that causes indeterministic and IMO unexpected behavior (why is the hour 7 once and 15 the next time?).

[bajalovic]

I had a problem that on Windows, wrong datetime format (year part - I used YYYY instead of yyyy) fallback to current year (2014). When I pushed the app to staging (Unix) wrong date format fallback to year 1970. I had trouble finding the problem, so maybe just update documentation with @webmozart sentence

The default values of the fields, when left away, should be the corresponding parts of the UNIX base timestamp 1970-01-01.

[immutef]

Any news on this? I'd like to use the functionality exactly as described, only collection month and year, but as DateTime.

[DanielBadura]

Any news on this?

[mvrhov]

@DanielBadura Nobody is working on this feel free to implement and create a pull request.

[xabbuh]

I am closing this old issue as it seems that noone cared enough to implement it.