biolab / biolab/orange3

Datetime: allow date-only and time-only display

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Python
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Description

**What's your use case?**
I don't know if this is at all possible, but when looking at daily patterns it sometimes makes sense to consider `hh:mm:ss` without considering `yyyy:mm:dd` preceding it. Currently, if my data contains time by specifying `hh:mm:ss` only, Orange assumes that this time is specified for `1970-01-01`, so wherever the time appears in, for instance a data table, it is shown as `1970-01-01 hh:mm:ss`.
For instance, I'm currently working on a tutorial on classification of people's presence in a room in order to provide predictions for a smart thermostat based on day of the week and time of the day, where at some point I split up the datetime in date and time.
It is annoying that I have to tell my students why this date `1970-01-01` is always there, and, also it is annoying having to deal with this unnecessarily space-consuming datetime expression in, for instance inequalities showing up in Tree Viewer.
Likewise, if only `yyyy-mm-dd` is specified, it is always assumed that the time is `00:00:00`, which is then also displayed in all cases.
I vaguely remember this was different in the past but I'm not sure.

**What's your proposed solution?**
automatically disregard `yyyy-mm-dd` if it isn't specified, and also automatically disregard `hh:mm:ss` if it isn't specified.

**Are there any alternative solutions?**
In some cases, converting to a string using Formula, and removing the unneeded part helps for presentation purposes, but this won't work, for instance, in Tree Viewer.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

Research direction

Start by reproducing date-only and time-only values in a data table, then inspect how the same datetime is displayed in Tree Viewer and after splitting values with Formula. Trace the parsing and display paths involved; done means omitted date or time components are no longer rendered as 1970-01-01 or 00:00:00 when they were not specified, including in inequality labels.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
python
Domain
data, data-visualization
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Quiet
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
48/100

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