Use part of Date field for grouping / sorting in View

Question

I'm creating a Schedule page. I created a Schedule Item content type with a Date field which tracks the date and the time. I want to create a View which lists Schedule Items grouped by Date alone.

My data looks like:

• 2012-07-01 08:00, Event 1
• 2012-07-01 11:00, Event 2
• 2012-07-01 11:30, Event 3
• 2012-07-02 09:00, Event 4
• 2012-07-02 10:30, Event 5

I would like this to be displayed grouped by the Date portion of that Date/time object so it looks like this:

• 2012-07-01
• • 08:00, Event 1
• • 11:00, Event 2
• • 11:30, Event 3

• 2012-07-02

• • 09:00, Event 4
• • 10:30, Event 5

I tried setting the Grouping on my View to use my Date field using a format that only displayed the Year-Month-Day. However, when doing the grouping, it is still grouping on the real value and not the displayed value. Meaning that since each Date/time value is actually different in the time portion, each value is being used as a separate group.

Is there a way I can generate a virtual field which only contains the Date portion of my Date/time field so that I can use it to properly group all items by Day?

Answer 1

Go to your view and add an extra date field, but hide it from display. Use that as the grouping field. Then create a views template for that field. You can look at the template name suggestions, something like views-view-field--field-date-1.tpl.php would work

The default content of that file would be

<?php print $output; ?>

But you need to replace that with

<?php print date('F Y', strtotime($row->node_data_field_date_field_date_value)); ?>

Where 'F Y' is the PHP date string format http://php.net/manual/en/function.date.php

Answer 2

I ended up solving it this way:

I added a Date field to my content type which only tracked the Year-Month-Day. Then I added a Time field to my content type which only tracked the Time.

In addition to making the grouping easier, it also represented my data is a much better fashion.