Custom Form -> Day Component -> Day -> Day First => Breakage

[Shai Berger]

Hi,

Having used XNAT in trivial ways so far, I am now trying to configure one for real use, and I've been playing with Custom Forms. I ran into a problem, which I don't see previously mentioned:

The Day Component of custom forms (a date field) has, in its configuration, a "Day" tab, and in it a checkbox named "Day First", which, when checked, makes the field show the day part of the date first. This applies both to the controls (the month selection box goes to the middle), and to the displayed date (i.e. September 27, 2025 becomes "27/09/2025"). This is the way I'd prefer things.

There's two problems with this. The first and smaller one is, that this checkbox can be set only per-field -- I haven't seen any way to set it globally, and since this is basically a locale thing, that is just a nuisance. I think that is a UI-design bug, but it's minor.

The bigger problem is that the displayed date ("27/09/2025" above) is also what gets saved, and what the system tries to use against the database. The database has its datestyle set to "ISO, MDY" (I'm not even sure if that was the default or XNAT's initialization, but that's what it is), so this value causes a "date value out of range" error in Postgres. Thus, I can't use the feature at all.

Am I missing something obvious?

I'm running XNAT 1.9.2.2 on Ubuntu 22.04, Postgres client v. 14, OpenJDK-8 from Ubuntu, Tomcat 9 from Ubuntu; Postgres server 17 (managed, Digital Ocean).

Thanks,

Shai.

[Mohana Ramaratnam]

Hi Shai,

How are you using the date once it's saved? With respect to saving the date from custom form, entire form data is saved into a JSON field and the specifics of the date format are hence ignored. 

Regards,
Mohana Ramaratnam,

 moh...@xnatworks.io
 xnatworks.io | Find us on LinkedIn! 

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[Shai Berger]

Hi Mohana,

I was just trying to add the column to a search -- and it broke the search (the search functionality, it seems, tries to create a temporary table where Day components are made into Date columns).

Thanks for looking into this!

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[Mohana Ramaratnam]

Hi Shai,

I can replicate your issue. We have created a ticket to track this issue. 

Regards,
Mohana Ramaratnam,

 moh...@xnatworks.io
 xnatworks.io | Find us on LinkedIn! 

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/xnat_discussion/CA%2Bq9tr6sb_coivBuYzapXEup%2BsDq%3DTuSdT_YVPEmq1Z4%3D79%2B8w%40mail.gmail.com.

[Shai Berger]

Thanks!

I wanted to start watching the issue and maybe add a comment, but it seems the account I created on your Jira is somehow broken and cannot do this.

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/xnat_discussion/CAHPNensjxjnzc6%3D0OeWUEQcf4B2TYCsmf-wCGvDn-S%2B1X-T2Ww%40mail.gmail.com.

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[Will Horton]

Shai, I'm attempting to triage this but I can't locate your user account. Please feel free to email me directly with your username and I can escalate. 

Regards,

Will 

[Mohana Ramaratnam]

Hello Shai,

We have a fix for XNAT-8532 (issue with day first setting on a form not displaying as a search column). 

I will share a war file with you for you to test. I will let you know once the upload is complete. 

Few points:

There are multiple places where dates are displayed in XNAT. These are:

a) On a report page of a Subject or Experiment
b) Via a form (like you are doing)
c) On a Search listing. 

In order to change the display of dates in case of a) above, use the Administer -> Site Administration -> Appearance to set the date format to dd-mm-yyyy. 



This will result in a display like for a) and b) (the case when custom form dayFirst enabled):


However, the search listings would display all dates as YYYY-MM-DD like

Regards,
Mohana Ramaratnam,

 moh...@xnatworks.io
 xnatworks.io | Find us on LinkedIn! 

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/xnat_discussion/03105ef7-350e-4517-aa9f-3bb268bd7da4n%40googlegroups.com.