Leave time unspecified in DateTime field for certain records (e.g. for "all day" events)

[Joel_R_Putnam]

The DateTime column type is fantastic for calendar view, and calendar view is great for exporting to other calendars. One main feature in most calendars on, for example, the iCal format, is the ability to create events that don’t have a specific time. These are usually marked as “all day” events. Or they could be useful for things when you know what the date is, but you haven’t figured out the time yet. At the moment, the workaround appears to be let the field default to the time of midnight. It’s workable, but I’d love to see the datatype be able to handle something like “null” for time.

[drassi]

Agreed! We keep track of a ton of event bookings, and some of them may have a specific start time, but others may just be an “all day” event, or one where we don’t yet know the exact start time. We currently use midnight to indicate this, but it’s a hack.

In the absence of a dedicated time-only column, we have to use datetime to keep track of our event start times. Unfortunately our datetime field doesn’t default to the time of midnight—ours defaults to the current time, which isn’t helpful when you’re picking any time other than now. So after I pick a future date in an empty datetime cell, e.g. 10/1/2018, the time is automatically picked as 8:50pm because that’s what time it is now. It’s a problematic behavior for us, I wish there were an actual way to configure the field to default to midnight.

But in the ideal case, we would like to be able to leave the time “unset” or null in a datetime field.

[Oliver_Weedon]

yep. Agreed. I can see this thread is 3 years old now. Has this now been done?