Is there an accepted standard for storing data as a year?

Question

To preface this, I'm using CiviCRM's integration on Drupal 7, with the Webform integration module.

I'm looking to store a number of custom fields as a year. It appears that I am able to use the Date field type to store a date in the format of "YYYY", which sounds like what I want to do. However, the widget that is presented to the user to input the data requires you to choose a specific date from a date picker rather than a year, even if it only stores the year.

On top of that, when I use the Webform module integration with CiviCRM, the widget that I am presented with has 3 dropdowns, one for month, one for day, and one for year.

Ideally both the backend widget and the Webform widget would simply be a select box that allows you to pick only the year starting about 60 years back and ends 20 years in the future. I'm sure I could just make a select box to do just that, but I don't want to manually edit the values in a select box just to get a simple date field.

Does anyone know if there is a way to handle this the way I'm describing or am I stuck using a full date field to simply store a year?

Answer 1

You can achieve this in Webform by hiding the day and month fields as well as deselecting the enable pop-up calendar option on the webform component. There you can also set how far back you'd like the years to go.

However, Civi still stores the entire date. I believe the date will be stored as Today's date, 2015 12:00 am if you select 2015 for example.

Answer 2

I think "year only" widgets could be improved in CiviCRM. Until that happens, you might be better off with a custom field of type "number".

In the webform you can specify a minimum and maximum amount to limit it to reasonable years.