There's a way to enter the datestamp (year, month, day, hours, minutes) with a set of selection boxes, but that requires five different selections to be made, which is too error-prone.
There's also a way to use the jquery calendar to enter the date, BUT that only includes the date - there's no easy way to input the hours and minutes when using the calendar.
So, two ways to make it easier:
1. Hour and minute selections in the jquery calendar (hmm, I'm sure I've seen this before with date module or jscalendar..), preselected current time
2. If the above is not possible, then give the calendar opportunity for the date and then two selection boxes for the hour and the minute. That would take just one click for the date and two selections for the time.

CommentFileSizeAuthor
#4 autocomplete.png766 bytestormu

Comments

tormu’s picture

Title: Too hard to input datestamp value » Timepicker missing / not working?
Category: feature » bug

Ok I checked the date_popup.module and it says on the comments like this "The element will create two textfields, one for the date and one for the time. The date textfield will include a jQuery popup calendar date picker, and the time textfield uses a jQuery timepicker."
When clicking the date field the calendar pops up, but when clicking the time field nothing happens. No JS errors, no popups (tested with IE7 and FF2)

Some more debug info:
- hasTimeEntry class appears to the input field
- tried the latest 5.x dev version of the whole module, too
- tried few other versions of the jquery.timeentry.pack.js (available from http://keith-wood.name/timeEntry.html)

jesss’s picture

Subscribing. The timepicker is also missing from 5.x-2.x-dev.

karens’s picture

Status: Active » Postponed (maintainer needs more info)

The timepicker is not a popup, you just type into it and it automatically prevents you from typing in invalid times and it adds in keyboard control so you can use your up/down arrows to change the time.

tormu’s picture

StatusFileSize
new766 bytes

Oh, now I see! Clicked and clicked it for ages and didn't think it would work like that :O
Well, this brings us to another problem, the browser autocomplete. When I have entered values to that field, the browser remembers my inputs and offers them on the next time. So I click on the field to activate it (no offers yet) and then press down/up from keyboard - the offers pop up. While pressing up or down, the autocomplete's selected offer changes too, so when I select 18:30 by using the keyboard and then press enter, the selected autocomplete offer replaces the 18:30 that I wanted (see attachment).
The way I solved this for my form is by adding a bit of jQuery: $('input.hasTimeEntry').attr('autocomplete', 'off');
This disables the autocomplete feature for that timeEntry-enabled input field. I know the attribute isn't XHTML, but I can live with that.. Any opinions?

My proposal is a simple up and down arrows next to the time field. Clicking the up key would be same as activating the field and pressing up key on keyboard (incrementing the value by whatever is selected on the field options) and clicking down would be same as pressing down key. I guess this way the browser wouldn't activate the autocomplete feature at all, if there's no click to the field itself.

karens’s picture

I've been looking for ideas on how to work around the browser autocompletion, I'd love to have a solution. I know that we have some users that need to be XHTML compliant but others won't care so maybe I can make that an option somehow, but a patch to get that working would be appreciated.

tormu’s picture

I'm sorry to say that I'm not that good at life as to put up a patch for this feature :(
But another idea for keeping it strict XHTML while making it easier to input the value (and with mouse only) would be to insert the date-field as text field and the time field as a set of select-dropdowns. Inserting 18:30 would just be selecting two values from two dropdowns. This, of course, should be made as an optional alternative to the current picker.

karens’s picture

Title: Timepicker missing / not working? » Timepicker changes
Category: bug » feature
Status: Postponed (maintainer needs more info) » Active

That would be a feature request and would take some work.

karens’s picture

Status: Active » Closed (won't fix)

No new features in D5, moving feature requests to D6. The D6 version uses a different timepicker, so this won't apply.