Hi - thanks for your contribution.
I thought about this previously (and experimented with it), but am not at all sure about it and previously decided against.
In our institution we only ever use this feature based on days. I presume other places would do the same, if only for simplicity.
The problem with supporting times is that it makes it worse for people who only use days.
1) it's possible to incorrectly set a 'deadline' / close date - if your deadline is the 24th say, you might set the deadline to the 24th. In fact, you need to choose the 25th at 00:00.
I considered solving this by making the default time 23:59:59 , so that you still only had to select the day you actually wanted, and the time would already be set for you. Unfortunately it is not possible to set 23:59:59 with the time/date selector! So that idea went out the window.
2) we want to reduce screen clutter and keep things simple for students - so when these dates are displayed, it only displays a date and not a time.
(there is already complicated logic so that it will do this and still show times in different timezones, however this would need changing for your proposal, so that a deadline of 25th at 00:00:00 displays as the 24th with no time).
These problems are obviously not insurmountable but I kind of still don't like the idea of people having to select the 25th when they mean the 24th.
It would be different if the time part of the date selector offered an 'end of this day' option (allowing users to choose 23:59:59 without having to explicitly say so). So another possibility would be to add this option to the time selector dropdown. That might actually not be too hard...
I think this should maybe be discussed more widely to discuss what's best, e.g. can I add that option to the time selector or will it just confuse people, etc. Do you want to start a forum discussion or shall I?
Improvement
Open
Minor
Hi Sam,
See attached patch to implement this improvement. I remove the forced setting of availableuntil to 23:59:59 as this would override any time entered through the form.
Also, function show_time in lib/conditionlib.php probably doesn't need to do a check for whether to display a date or full date and time as the latter should always be displayed.
What do you think? This patch is mostly minor form and date display changes - the underlying implementation already supports time, so hopefully it's worth doing.
Cheers,
James