Dates in TBX

Dates are the thing in Tinderbox that I always stumble over. What I want is to enter the information I have: the years someone reigns in England, the year and month a film comes out. But date attributes in TBX require days and hours and minutes and seconds, and when I don’t have them, missing information is filled in with false numbers.

On the one hand, I get it. The attribute needs to complete its form. On the other hand, something grates about storing knowingly false data. And in files where I know dates to different levels of detail, distinguishing between months and days that are accurate and those that are invented can be difficult.

In most contexts, I manage this by using strings that hold the info I know. Or maybe a combo of a $Month and a $Year attribute if I think I will need to search in a detailed or granular way. (In some cases, I just need info to be accessible for reference and a single displayed string attribute is fine for everything.)

The problem with getting by with strings is that it keeps me from using the timeline view, which is the problem I’m trying to work through now. I spent the summer reading through four or five histories of medieval England and would like to organize my notes into a single TBX file. Ideally some of those notes would be visible in timeline view. But with pre-Norman dates, I rarely have more than a year. So how do I minimize the confusing false data that date attributes produce for months days and time?

I’m toying with entering January 1st as the day for dates I don’t know beyond the year. But maybe there’s a better way.