You system allows new users to register and enter their wedding date. Being a purist, I wanted to store this as a date. After user interviews, it was clear that the reality differs from this approach. Users are often not sure of the day or the month, and wish to store partial dates, so ‘June 2009’ or ‘sometime in 2012’.
Does anyone know a good design pattern that allows the storing partial dates, and then trying to create a timeline for the big day – even though there are partial dates entered?
Maybe a ‘fuzzy’ date. If they say ‘June 2009’, that could be stored as 15 June 2009, with a variance of +/- 15 days.
‘sometime in 2010’ would be 01 July 2010 with a variance of 180 days.
So store a date and a # days.
If/how that would work in practice I don’t know. Just an idea. A date range might be easier to implement.