Month and/or year selecion in DatePicker

[julianobrasil]

Bug, feature request, or proposal:

Feature

What is the expected behavior?

User being able to select a month in a year, or just a full year number. The component already have a startView attribute. It could have also a view attribute so the component could be configured to show just months of the year, or years.

What is the current behavior?

The user can select a full date only (day, month and year).

What is the use-case or motivation for changing an existing behavior?

Although the design docs does mention that will be a date & time option in the future, it does not mention this feature (at least, not explicitly). It's sometimes useful to set the view of a datepicker to allow the selection of just a month or a year. Maybe the problem is related to the date object, that demands a complete date. But it can be left to the developer the control of what is being grabbed from the datepicker, for example:

• if in year view mode and the user selects july/2017, the component parse it to the first day of july. Something like new Date(2017,6,1);
• if in "decades" view mode and the user selects the year of 2017, the component parse it to the first day of 2017. Something like new Date(2017,0,1).

The developer would have to know how he configured the component and what kind of information it'll give back to him.

The current state of the component can be used for the user to select a month and a year, but it's too confusing to the user if I put a full calendar to choosing just a month (along with some information like "choose any day in the desired month").

A work around to the lack of this feature is to use a regular mdInput with type="number" (that's the way I use for now, because, after all, representing months as numbers are common knowledge). But it's not a nice way because the user must select (in case of months) the month and the year in separate controls.

Which versions of Angular, Material, OS, TypeScript, browsers are affected?

all

Is there anything else we should know?

no

[fxck]

it will be added eventually #675 (comment) (and following discussion)

[mmalerba]

dup of #5845

[mmalerba]

oh whoops, misread this, not a dup

[julianobrasil]

@mmalerba, they are very similar, in fact 😄

This component let me choose the year (it returns an integer instead of a Date or Moment object):

Returning an integer is an alternative when you use a datepicker configured to work in Month or Year mode. It's better than just use a regular input with type=number

[julianobrasil]

This is a first approach of a wrapper to the datepicker in order to achieve some kind of pickers I need in a project of mine. Maybe it can help if someone needs something like a month picker. It's not fully tested: https://stackblitz.com/edit/angular-mulitdate-picker-demo

@mmalerba, the yearSelected and monthSelected outputs really make the picker more flexible. But you know what? In this particular project, I also need a week picker and a semester picker. I worked it around using filters. Is this kind of feature too far from the final goal planned for this component? Month and year pickers are pretty common, but week picker is kind of rare and semester picker... I think I'm the only one in the world who is using it. hahaha

[mmalerba]

@julianobrasil I want to try to abstract out the concept of a calendar view, have it be some interface that people can provide their component as. Then allow people to put custom views in the calendar and have the calendar interact with them via that interface. Similar idea to how the form field works with custom form field controls, haven't gotten the time to work on it yet though.