Stepper behavior in an NSDatePicker messed up?

Question

I have an NSDatePicker with text and stepper. The steppers show behavior that I find quite unintuitive. If my date picker is at the 26th of April and I select the day number, then click "up" a few times, the date picker cycles back to April 1st after the 30th!

enter image description here

How do I make the picker continue into May?

What happens if you select the month, and then click up a few times? — Robert Harvey, Jun 26 '13 at 20:23
And what happens if you select the year, and then click up a few times? — Robert Harvey, Jun 26 '13 at 20:27
This kind of behavior is not exactly unprecedented; it's much simpler to set a date (or a time on a clock, etc.) this way, rather than having to cycle through endless numbers of days (or minutes) to get to where you want, and it would be counter-intuitive to have it work both ways. — Robert Harvey, Jun 26 '13 at 20:29
That is true, but if my user would want to add 7 days, it's quite a bit more work. I would expect some way to select the stepper behavior, but I do not think there's a one-line way to do it. — Carelinkz, Jun 26 '13 at 20:37

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 27 '13 at 07:13

You might be able to use the delegate method - (void)datePickerCell:(NSDatePickerCell *)aDatePickerCell validateProposedDateValue:(NSDate **)proposedDateValue timeInterval:(NSTimeInterval *)proposedTimeInterval as it sends a message whenever the date changes, however it does not inform whether the change was made through the buttons or through keyboard, so if the user manually changed the date from 30-04-2013 to 01-04-2013 you have no way of telling if they did it with the buttons or with the keyboard. You might be able to subclass the buttons to detect if a click happened, but I would say that's too much of a hassle. I would say this should be the least of your worries, or you could do what Robert Harvey suggested which is to use a dropdown calendar, which can be changed using the method [datePicker setDatePickerStyle:NSClockAndCalendarDatePickerStyle] or through interface builder.

Stepper behavior in an NSDatePicker messed up?

1 Answers1