[Development] Calendar Systems proposal

[Lars Knoll]

I wonder whether we can't keep handling of different calendars completely outside of QDate. Something similar to what we've done with QString/QLocale. So QDate would continue unchanged and only support the standard Gregorian calendar. In addition, we have a QCalendar class, that can be constructed with a different calendar system, and can then return 'localized' date strings, days, months and years for this calendar system.

Something like:

QDate date;
QCalendar c(QCalendar::Hebrew);
QString hebrewDateString = c.toString(date);
int hebrewYear = c.year(date);

Maybe one could even integrate this into QLocale, that already provides support for localized month and day names?

Cheers,
Lars



On 19/12/16 14:18, "Development on behalf of Soroush Rabiei" <development-bounces+lars.knoll=qt.io at qt-project.org on behalf of soroush.rabiei at gmail.com> wrote:

    
    Can you elaborate on the reasons that prevent any change of that kind in
    QDate? Maybe they can be worked around?
    
    
    
    
    
    According to https://community.kde.org/Policies/Binary_Compatibility_Issues_With_C%2B%2B#The_Do.27s_and_Don.27ts Adding a member to struct
     or class is not possible without breaking ABI. On the other hand https://wiki.qt.io/Qt-Version-Compatibility suggests that Qt minor releases are backwards binary and source compatible. So there is no
     chance of touching QDate in Qt5 series.
    
    
    I'm working on a solution to provide calendar functionality without breaking ABI, while considering possibilities for Qt6 (keep minimum effort for converting current, temporary solution to futures Qt6 one). This may fail of course, There are too many details
     that need to be discussed. How we are supposed to change underlying calendar without adding information to QDate? Can we add arguments to all methods with a default value? Something like:
    
    
    
    
        QDate d;
        qDebug() << d.year();               // prints 2016
        qDebug() << d.year(QCalendar::Jalali); // prints 1395
    
    
    
    And then force relevant widgets/views to show/edit date and time on a specific calendar system:
    
    
        QDateEdit de;
        de.setDate(d);
        de.setCalendarSystem(QCalendar::Hebrew); // Is this possible?