New date-field keyboard shortcuts?

Certified Lead Developer

A few versions ago, it was announced in the official release notes that date fields would get a new keyboard shortcut, i.e. pressing "T" to autofill with the current date.  So far, I have been unable to get this functionality to work in any date field, any Appian version, or any browser.  I was just curious whether anyone else out there had any different experience?  Am I missing something?

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  • Here's the video explaining this feature

    youtu.be/247Rivcu24o

    When your cursor is on the date field, hit the down arrow button to activate the calendar control, then press t to set to current date
  • 0
    Certified Lead Developer
    in reply to malcolm.ross

    Hi Malcolm,

    Thanks for the clarification, I'm now able to reproduce that behavior, specifically after focusing into the calendar picker (via "down arrow" keypress or similar).  If it matters much, here is some feedback from some of the end users of my main project, who have been having trouble with the new functionality:

    • When first focusing on the field (i.e. before expanding the calendar control, like when tabbing directly into the date field from a prior field), pressing "t" simply inserts a "t" character into the calendar box, which does nothing other than show some red error text.  To really be intuitive, it should work the same way whether or not the calendar dropdown is open.
    • Even if the above worked as we expect as detailed in the prior bullet point, it's not very useful for us when filling out date/time fields [which represent maybe 98% of date pickers in the application these users use] because we still have to manually type the time to get the *current* time value, which is a very common need.  Pressing "t" (or perhaps another shortcut letter) should fill in not only the current date but also the current time when the picker is date/time.

    Thanks again for the feedback, and I hope we can help to perhaps further refine this functionality in the future to save our users more time (no pun intended).