Year only import

Question

Is it possible to do a Contact import where a date column is in year only format (2018,2020 etc)? I tried looking at the Administer -> Localization -> Date Formats and noticed year only is an option for "Date Display", but it doesn't appear as an option in Contacts -> Import Contacts. I can't find anything about it in the official documentation.

Furthermore, If it cannot be done, are there any negative effects functionality wise (Filtering data/ Reports) if I was to change the format to Alphanumeric? The customer really wants it to be date format.

Edit: I'm guessing that even if it is in year only display, it needs to have an actual real date associated with it to be a valid "Date". I'm just concerned for functionality reasons.

Answer 1

When I have had something like this I have just set the dates to 01/01/2018 or 01/01/2020 in the file to be imported, which means that if you set the date more precisely for future contacts entered in directly that you can still sort by the date. Just means that if its the first day of the year it might not be precise. As long as users are aware of this, then I can't see that causing any problems.