Drupal 7 date/text field issue

Question

I have a content type in Drupal that is a text field that holds a date that the user types in. No, its not an actual date field unfortunately (ugghhh). What I need to do is make a view that has an exposed field that can pull content that is between 2 dates. For example I want to get all of the nodes who's date field is between 2012-09-01 and 2012-09-30.

I'm guessing I could convert these fields using a computed field with strtotime(). But the problem I would run into is not being able to filter between 2 times (basically 2 strings of numbers) in an exposed filter. Is there a way to do that?

If you are saving the computed field into the db/content type as a hidden date field, could you not create a filter on that field instead of the original text field? — nmc
Can you point me in the right direction as to how to save the computed field as a hidden date field? — Dustin
Sorry my mistake. I was thinking of something else that isn't possible with Computed Field alone. Rather, I was thinking of using Rules to replicate the the data and save it as an actual date field that is hidden from the display. It's a round about way of doing it but might work. — nmc
Did you manage to do this? Struggling with the same situation! — Collins

Lokapujya Lokapujya · Accepted Answer · 2014-09-02T22:23:11

Create a date field on the content type. The date field will be "parallel" to the text field that you already have. Use a hook such as hook_node_presave (or you can use rules) to update the date field to be the converted date format of the text field. Then, you can use that date field as the raw data for sorting.

However, is there really a good reason why it is not already a date field?

Drupal 7 date/text field issue

1 Answers