Can't use "to-" date tokens in pathauto

Looks like it is an issue in pathauto that could be corrected in the _pathauto_check_pattern function in the pathauto.admin.inc file. There needs to be a check for the -???? after a pattern. Both the token module:

./token/token_node.inc: $tokens['node']['mod-????'] = t('All tokens for node creation dates can also be used with with the "mod-" prefix; doing so will use the modification date rather than the creation date.');

and the date module use this syntax for listing their tokens:

./date/date/date_token.inc: $tokens['date']['to-????'] = t("If the field has a to-date defined, the same tokens exist in the form: [to-????], where ???? is the normal token.");

There might be other modules that use this syntax.

For now I just hacked the date module. You can apply the attached patch to the modules/date/date/date_token.inc file to add each pattern for the to-???? then you can use pathauto without issues, but I'm sure there is a better way to handle this in the pathauto module.

Date tokens are provided by date.module. The [mod-????] tokens will be fixed with #375887: Add a 'since' date token.

Does the patch in #1 work? And if so can this get committed to the Date module so we don't have to be hacking the code?

The reason date module used ['to-????'] is shorthand for the many tokens that are already listed for the primary/from date. If we included them all explicitly, that would be a LOT more tokens for each date field.

The validation of tokens by pathauto is now actually performed by token_element_validate_token_context() in token module.

So, two solutions: extend wildcard support in token validation (there is some already), or explicitly add all the tokens to date (and any other module that does the same thing).

I've submitted a feature-request to token module to extend the wildcard support, in part to address this issue. See #1147452: Add support for non-numeric wildcards during validation

@lyricns, thank you for clarification on this issue and for submitting the request. So from your comments, should I understand that the patch above does actually work?

@aaronpinero: yes, the patch in #1147452: Add support for non-numeric wildcards during validation works.

That other issue now looks like it's tending towards supporting a form of wildcards that aren't useful for this problem. If you don't mind patching Token in the meantime, use the patch in

http://drupal.org/node/1147452#comment-4433226

Fix in #1147452: Add support for non-numeric wildcards during validation has been committed to Token 6.x-1.x-dev. I was able to use [field_date-to-value] and it passed validation.

Thanks, Dave