'Member Since' date far in the past - date range-checking too inflexible

[David Hepper]

My non-profit has Life members who joined over 50 years ago. Their 'Member Since' dates are thus well beyond the concessionary 20 years ago that CiviMember allows. See issues.civicrm.org/jira/browse/CRM-1480. Dave G. said at the time that this was increased to 20 from 3 "We will be looking at a more general solution for date field configuration in a future release." That was in 1.7.
Are not arbitrary, unconfigurable limits like this against the spirit of open source in general and CiviCRM in particular?

[jaapjansma]

I think you can change this in CiviCRM under Administer --> Localisation --> Date Formats --> Advacned settings

[David Hepper]

  Jaap, that's just what I needed. And very well hidden!
For anyone else looking for this, on 4.4.3 it is Localization > Date Formats > Advanced Date Input Settings (link part way down) > activityDate > Start Offset. Mine is now set to 100 years, allowing entering of 1914. Should be plenty.
Many thanks.
David

[David Hepper]

Mostly the changes worked...
... but I think there is a bug in the range-checking of Memberships > Batch Data Entry. The 'Member Since' date, and possibly the others, are validated against the old default of '20 years before now'. Thus any date earlier than 1994 currently fails validation at the import stage and causes the whole batch to be rejected. Should I report this or can I leave it to someone else?

[jaapjansma]

You should report this

[calbasi]

Jaap, that's just what I needed. And very well hidden!
For anyone else looking for this, on 4.4.3 it is Localization > Date Formats > Advanced Date Input Settings (link part way down) > activityDate > Start Offset. Mine is now set to 100 years, allowing entering of 1914. Should be plenty.
Many thanks.
David

 

[David Hepper]

I've belatedly reported this bug at https://issues.civicrm.org/jira/browse/CRM-16006 having tried unsuccessfully to see whether it has been fixed in a later version than 4.4.3.
If anyone can suggest a workaround that defeats the date validation temporarily I would be grateful. Unfortunately, I'm not competent to try amending the PHP.
David

[joanne]

Just FYI, from 4.6  the  Advanced Date Input Settings  have become Date preferences and will located under Customise Data and screens.  https://issues.civicrm.org/jira/browse/CRM-14578

[David Hepper]

@Joanne - yes, I fully support this move to Date Preferences.

There is a workaround for the problem - details in a note attached to JIRA CRM-16006. In brief, at Advanced Date Input Settings set the 'custom' date range the same as the 'activityDate' range and Batch Update Membership will validate your Member-Since, Start and End dates in the same way as on the Membership form.

David