Minor Improvement to Cover Date

I've been making use of the excellent new "store_date" and "cover_date" fields in the issue object, and I've run into one minor problem with "cover_date":

One the website, it is possible (and in fact extremely common) to specify a "fuzzy" date, which does not include a "day" value, just a year and a month (or a quarter). However, the API always provides the cover_date as a non-fuzzy date, i.e. 2010-9-25. The problem with this is that there is no way to tell the difference between an actually fuzzy date (2010-9) and a specific date (2010-9-25). This means I have to arbitrarily assume all cover dates are either fuzzy, or all are specific.

Two straightforward ways that I can think of that would help me deal with this:

1) don't provide the day for fuzzy dates ("2010-9" vs "2010-9-25"), or,

2) provide an extra field in the date:

<cover_date> <date>2010-9-25</date><fuzzy>true</fuzzy></cover_date>

Thanks again for all the work you guys have been putting into the API lately!

@cbanack: You may want to note that some comics only have years listed in their cover dates (I have some sitting right in front of me) and quarterly dates are also possible so that's something else that would need to be specified in the API.

So it would have to distinguish

• 2010-9-25
• 2010-9
• 2010
• 2010-Q1 (?)

@kirtai, I would like to test against some examples of those oddball cover dates. Can you share links to the issues you mentioned above? Would help a lot!

@comictagger:

Comics from Anti-Ballistic Pixelations only have the year in their indicia. e.g. Gremlin Trouble (and TPB + Specials) and Saiko & Lavender. (Incidentally, note the numbering on the Specials.)

I don't have a link to a quarterly one to hand but it's an option when setting a fuzzy date (Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4)

@kirtai Thanks. I see now the problem that @cbanack was talking about. I hadn't ever even gone into the editing here. I've been strictly a (raw) data consumer!