Transaction Entry Dates

[Lance Edgar]

On 07/20/2014 03:30 AM, John Ralls wrote:
> It has been a long-standing and often discussed problem that transaction entry dates can change with time zone, and https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=137017 has many useful comments on the subject. But today I discovered https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=89439 with an alternative view, that Date Entered should be Time Entered, and that there should be an optional column in the register to show the time. That suggests an alternative solution to the problem while adding a sorting option for transactions.
>
> I've created two "suggestions" on UserVoice. Please vote for the one you prefer:
>
> https://gnucash.uservoice.com/forums/101223-feature-request/suggestions/6194177-add-an-optional-entry-time-field-to-the
> https://gnucash.uservoice.com/forums/101223-feature-request/suggestions/6194125-fix-the-moving-entry-date-problem-by-getting-rid-o
>
> Regards,
> John Ralls

These issues have not affected me personally (yet), although I see why 
it could be quite frustrating for those it does.  I've just read over 
the bug reports and the new suggestions.  My initial thought is, why 
must we choose between these two approaches versus combining them?  Esp. 
given the current UserVoice vote of 3-4; looks like you'd be leaving 
half the users (who prefer either approach) unsatisfied.

In some cases it seems useful to have the actual *time* (with TZ/offset) 
recorded as an attribute of when a txn truly occurred, e.g. because that 
data is available and relevant.  That seems obvious enough from a user's 
perspective I think.  But in many (presumably most) cases the date is 
all that actually matters.  Since the "problem" appears to be, "how to 
store and display a single data value which provides both needs", to me 
it begs the question, why are we not storing and displaying *two* 
distinct values, each of which is designed to meet a distinct need?

This seems to have been more or less suggested already by Peter Selinger:

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=137017#c28

I have never even looked at the code, so couldn't estimate the 
difficulty of the effort, but adding a distinct "date" attribute in 
addition to whatever "time" is currently provided seems hopefully a 
straightforward thing?    Then the "time" enhancements (i.e. exposing in 
the UI etc.) could be added as a second step.

Hopefully I haven't just repeated one half of a conversation which has 
been had 5 times already... ;)

Lance