Thanks for reading.  A few disclaimers:

1.  I am a newbie.  I program for a living, but my work in pg has so far 
been at the "devoted hobby level," using pg and PHP.  For an example of 
what I have done with pg, you can visit www.the-athenaeum.org , a site I 
one day hope to make into a business.

2.  I've searched the archives, but can't find a good solution to my 
problem.  I realize that there may be better ways to solve my issues 
than expanding pg's feature set, or there may be features I'm not 
familiar with.  This message is partly to find out how I should approach 
my problem.

3.  I know you are all busy, and there are more pressing issues.  I am 
extremely grateful for any advice you can give me, and will be ecstatic 
if I can get a solution out of this.

So, on to my issue.

THE BACKGROUND - I am creating a web site where people can study the 
humanities.  They can upload, discuss, and peer-review information. They 
can also create, edit, approve, and delete records in a postgresql db, 
using web forms.  Many of these forms need a way to enter historical 
dates - a person DOB, the date an empire was founded, the date a book 
was published, etc. 

MY PROBLEM - Because this site deals with, among other things, ancient 
art, acheaology, and anthropology, I need a way to handle dates as 
specific as a single day, and as far back as 100,000 BC.  According to 
the docs (I looked at 
http://www.postgresql.org/idocs/index.php?datatype-datetime.html), the 
farthest back any date type reaches is 4713 BC.  So far, I have tried to 
deal with this problem by creating a numeric field for the year, and 
radio buttons for AD/BC.  I then do a lot of form validation.  Not only 
that, if I want to be as specific as a month or a day, then those are 
separate fields on my forms.  Plus, I can't combine all of the fields 
and put them into a pg data type, because once again, the pg dates don't 
extend that far back.  So, I have to maintain and validate the year, 
month, and day fields separately.  Then imagine what I have to do if a 
user wants to _sort_ by date, or select events by date range! 

Ideally, I would like to figure this out on two fronts.  I'd like to 
find out what's the best way to store dates that far back (with pg), and 
then on the PHP end I'll have to figure out how to parse entry so that 
it is as simple as possible for the end user.  Knowing how to store 
these ancient dates in pg would help me a great deal.

There are a lot of university and hobby sites out there working on 
digitizing collections of ancient texts, artifacts, etc.  I don't know 
how the date range is chosen for a type like timestamp (4713BC - 
1,465,001 AD), but it seems to me that there would be way more people 
working on recording the past (and thereby needed a date range that 
extends into ancient civilization) than working with dates in the far 
future (more than a million years ahead???).

I hope that someone will be kind enough to reply with some ideas, or 
even to take up the cause and consider a date type that could be used 
for historical purposes.  I am an avid fan of open source and pg, 
especially as compared to mySQL.  I hope to continue using pg, and build 
a first-class web site that may one day serve as a great working example 
of what pg can do.  Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance,
Chris McCormick


Fri, 14 Jun 2002 15:59:40 -0400
"Chris McCormick" <cmccormick@thestate.com>
FEATURE REQUEST -  More dynamic date type