Custom timestamps for staging area purposes

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Hi - I’m having trouble with the new timestamps. I would like to have a custom/old-style ‘timestamp’ field that includes just the date, not the full timestamp.

In the past I’ve used timestamps as a “staging area” sorting process (similar to the ideas here Show recently added articles / staging area - #4 by reox ). Having timestamp granularity at the level of date (not datetime) means secondary sorting works, e.g. “show me the entries I added today in alphabetical order, so I can compare against a list of files in a directory”.

I just switched computers and now I’m using Jabref 5.3 portable on Debian. NB this means I have moved my .bibs and my preferences but I never went through migration, i.e. migration of timestamp by DominikVoigt · Pull Request #7671 · JabRef/jabref · GitHub )

I’ve discovered the new ‘creationdate’ options and turned that on; my preferences still also show the old ‘timestamp’, which is still in my bibs (no migration). (Confusingly, ‘creationdate’ is an actual timestamp format (date+time) while ‘timestamp’ is just a date, at least for me!).

I have never used cleanup actions so I don’t know if that is an option for me (e.g. generate a custom dated ‘timestamp’ from the auto-‘creationdate’). Alternatively I can’t see where I could change the format of creationdate such that it shows just date, not datetime.

Thanks for your help!
Stella

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I have not found an option that creates just the date without time. Neither in cleanup, nor in preferences. While it is possible to convert timestamp to creationdate, it is not possible to do the reverse, so if you want to keep your old format, definitely make a backup.

I do see your use-case as something that would add to JabRef in a nice way, but not sure if worth the effort.

For now, i think a workaround would be to use ‘creationdate’ in combination with the search bar. Just enter the date for the current day (e.g.: 2021-09-24) and it will simply show all the entries you entered today, as long as the entries all have the ‘creationdate’ in the bib-file. After this you can still sort against secondary criteria in the entry-UI.

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to make sure that no other fields are triggered, use the term creationdate = 2021-09-24