Date field - choose multiple dates?

App Development
1

Hey,
So I’m creating an app for recording volunteering activities. Each month, users will fill out a “volunteering report”, selecting a volunteer from a table, and selecting which dates that volunteer volunteered.
Now I know there’s a “date column” for one individual date, and there’s a “date range” column where you can choose a contiguous range. But what I’m looking for is selecting multiple dates (e.g. April 4th, 7th, 28th). Can I create such a field that will contain multiple dates?
Thanks!

2

Hi
Interesting question. But I have one for you.
Imagine that you could somehow collect individual dates, and spans of dates that a volunteer has volunteered… then what?

What do you want to do with that data?

I ask because what you want to do with it, may help to decide what kind of data is most useful to collect.

For example - if you merely want to report the text in the answer, list of days per volunteer the your data collection need is simple.

But if you want to collate the data, summarize or calculate you need something more sophisticated.
For example. Do you need to answer questions like - how many volunteers worked on the 17th?. Or how many days has volunteer X volunteered this quarter … then I think you need to consider connected tables of data. With dates in one table, volunteers in another, and individualmonthlyvolunteeringrecords in a 3rd.

3

Thanks for your reply. There are two main reasons:

  1. Allow an external 3rd party (e.g. school) to easily report the volunteering activities. So if a school administrator can choose multiple dates for student X it would be much more user-friendly compared to having to fill 5 forms for student X, each time selecting 5 different dates.

  2. In the end I’ll need to somehow produce a type of “invoice” that summarizes the volunteering activities for each school / group of students. Here it would be fine to simply have a text string that expresses the multiple dates.

So the main point is number 1… having a convenient form to create a monthly report (which conains many different dates).