RFC2: Date/Time proposal

[Charles Day]

On Mon, Jul 21, 2008 at 3:22 AM, Mike or Penny Novack <
stepbystepfarm at mtdata.com> wrote:

>
>
>>>>
>>> I believe several users have expressed that they do not want a time
>>> written
>>> to their data file if they never actually entered one. That's one of the
>>> things I am proposing to support with this proposal. Saving defaulted
>>> transaction times would mean that when you read the file back in, you
>>> wouldn't know which times were user-entered and which times were
>>> defaulted.
>>>
>>>
>> Not EXACTLY.
>
> Or at least it wasn't what I was asking about.
>
> What happens now, what happens given the proposal, if the user does not
> enter a transaction time? WHAT time gets entered? (what value is used for
> the time component and if not a constant value, upon what does it depend?)
>

The default time of day would be determined by a preference. See (6) of the
proposal. I proposed that defaulted times would not get saved to the data
file, and you could change preference (6) at any time.

>
> My question is related to the "stability" of sort operations (a sort is
> "stable" if/f when a set of records is sorted by field X, the relative order
> of records which have the same value in field X is the same after the sort
> as before).
>

Sorts are stable unless you change your preference in (6); at that point the
time of day would be updated on all transactions not having a user-entered
time of day. All transactions would then get resorted. Would that work for
you, or would you rather see a change to preference (6) only affect
transactions entered *after* the change?

The way sorts work currently is that transactions are sorted by timestamp,
then by description, then (as a tie breaker) by GUID. I don't anticipate
that changing.

-Charles


> Michael
>
>
>