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Context-Sensitive Date Formats in Certificate

1 Requirements

Issueing certificates is a matter of legally binding documents.
Thus, it is important that those documents fulfill certain formal requirements.
One of these requirements is a correct date format which differs from one language/country to another.
So, in the interest of properly ligitable certificate documents, ILIAS should offer options to configure those formats and assign them to specific languages or countries.

Problem:
 
It is difficult to decide what is the appropriate criterion that should determine what format is to be used:

• E.g., there are different countries using the same official language and countries in which different official languages are used.
• Though an employee might be from some country and use a some interface language, his/her company might decide to issue certificates in a format that is usual in a specific country, e.g., the one where the company is registered.

Anyway, we suggest to use language as criterion because country might not be a mandatory field, so the data might be missing.
 

Proposal:
 
In the "Certificate" dialogue of the administration, a separate page is introduced that offers to:

• Create date format items:
  There should be a button with subsequent creation dialogue that allows to:

  • Choose among all known date formats.
  • Choose a language that determines whether the date format is used.

• Display a matrix table with

  • The abovementioned items in rows and the installed languages in columns.
  • Radio buttons in every cell.

• Delete existing rows of that table

2 Status

• Funding: Required
• Development: Feature is to be developed by tbd
• Maintainer: Calendar: Stefan Meyer, Certificate: Michael Jansen

3 Additional Information

• If you want to know more about this feature, its implementation or funding, please contact: sesterhenn (at) qualitus.de

4 Discussion

JF 20 Jan 2014: We already have the following settings:

• Administration > Calendar: A global settings for a date (input) format
• In the personal settings: User selected date format

Unfortunately these settings are not respected in the calendar. We should also check why we do not have an output related format specified (and why an input/output separation is necessary at all), with the calendar maintainer.
 
However this list could be used in the certificate service as well to define the format used within a certificate. We think the issuer of a certificate should define the format, not the receiving user. All date-related placeholders in certificates should respect this setting.
 
We appreciate the feature but it should be funded together with a basic improvements in the calendar service.

5 Implementation

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