Re: [Gnumed-devel] Handling of time hh:mm:ss in dob (date of birth)

[Karsten Hilbert]

On Sat, Aug 23, 2008 at 10:44:57AM +0200, Jerzy Luszawski wrote:

> Just a short comment: in my opinion time and time zone is
> neither necessary nor easy to handle in the dob field.
While I agree it is not particularly practical to handle it
is just plain wrong that the time zone is not necessary.

> Looking from practical point of view: except perhaps
> neonatologists noone cares for time of birth, so why bother
> everyone with it? 
Because we try to model reality. But we can chose how as
described in an earlier mail.

> It is also more bug-proof.
Why ?

> Now when I enter a date i must enter it in format
> yyyy-mm-dd or with '/' as separator, even when my locale is
> set to 'dd-mm-yyyy'. When entering the date as eg.
> 2008-08-13 the time gets set to 20:08, still don't know why.
That's the play-it-safe time default regarding DST switchover.

> Saving only date makes also time zone handling unnecessary. 
Wrong.

> Storing date without time prevents strange date comparison
> results.
There is no strange date comparison results. Only wrong
comparisons with therefore unexpected results. Any such
thing is a bug we should like to fix.

> Consider this: dob = '2008-08-03 20:00' now =
> '2008-08-22 15:00' patient age = ? I thing most doctors
> would rather have this as 19 days (days difference) than 18
> days with couple of hours, as exact comparison returns.

That's a frontend/display issue. Nothing to do with the
backend. The database should store "the truth" and not
something we at a certain point in time considered "enough".

What is *displayed*, however, is another matter and
should/will be subject to user feedback.

Karsten
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