Well, I'm writing this just to see if you guys have better ideas for a couple of problems I have; maybe you dealt with them in some way that I didn't think of.
The issues are two: 1) MC doesn't pad anything date related (i.e. everything is always '2' and not '02'), and that leads to some column alignment that it never sat right with me (MC doesn't pad a lot of other stuff - Episodes, seasons, etc.). I guess there is a reason, but I'd like to know more why. 2) MC doesn't do partial dates. Anything must have a full date, yyyy-mm-dd or other things get filled in. This doesn't work for a number of items.
Say I index photos of monthly periodicals. Or Music videos where I can only approximate at best that a video was aired in 1992, in April. One can't get a date the likes of 1992-04-xx. It becomes 1992-4-1. This is bad because it automagically populates the 'Day' field with value 1, and that will confuse the issue when evaluating if I really have the full date for something (like when it was legit released on the first day of April in the example given), or it was just MC auto-populating fields, cramming everything in the first day of the month.
This led me to create a complex scaffolding of alternate *Year, *Month, *Day and a calculated *Date field that displays stuff just right. But it's exhausting to keep using things that have no relationships with anything else, and are solely specific to what I do in MC (unless I start renaming files with them). Say I extract date elements using regex from a string field, if I can't get a full date I have to remember to use my alternates or things get auto filled in.
Do you guys have any thoughts...? Other ideas?
