Feature request: Support "DD MMM YYYY" date format while importing transactions

[tarun7singh]

Describe the bug
For importing transactions using CSV file from my American Express card, its not supporting following type of dates "DD MMM YYYY" for example 11 May 2024, 15 Apr 2024.

To Reproduce
Steps to reproduce the behavior:

1. Go to import CSV.
2. Paste following CSV

Date,Date Processed,Description,Amount
03 Oct 2024,05 Oct 2024,=SIMPLYINDIAN,6.76
03 Oct 2024,04 Oct 2024,MOBILE,82.21

3. No supporting date format is available
   

Expected behavior
Support "DD MMM YYYY" format

I'm working on PR for this.

[zachgoll]

@tarun7singh while I agree that it would be nice to have this, I think this opens us up to a huge list of possible formats that a user could want. Currently, we've got all ISO8601 compliant formats as selectable options to simplify the logic of the import.

If we wanted to introduce a custom, non-ISO8601 date, I think we'd need a separate UI/UX where the user could type in the specific Ruby-enabled format that they want (i.e. "%e %b %Y")

At this early stage of the product, I think we should hold off on this and wait until this flow reaches a bit more stability.

[tfantina]

@tarun7singh if you are actively working on this great! If not I can open a PR in a day or two.

[tarun7singh]

Will wait for a full implementation plan and design docs so this can be approved.

[zachgoll]

@tfantina before starting any work, could you share your implementation plan? I don't think we should introduce a non-ISO8601 compliant date format to this process without considering the correct UI/UX for this.

I'm going to move this over to feature requests for now.

If we can come up with a good implementation, more than happy to consider a contribution for this.

[tarun7singh]

My suggestion for this would be to allow user to put a custom format to parse after giving some example in docs or as a tooltip.

[zachgoll]

This has been implemented and is available in the latest version of the app.

[aphick]

DD MMM YYYY still does not appear to be an option when importing transactions.

[zachgoll]

@aphick ahh, that's my bad. We had added DD.MM.YYYY and I had marked this one as implemented.

That said, we won't be able to support DD MMM YYYY yet since it is not ISO8601 compliant. Due the vast number of different languages we support, a string like 03 May 2024 would have to be translated to tens of different languages and could not easily be parsed and converted to an ISO date on our end.

Would love to be able to support this, but it introduces too much complexity at the moment. For now, any imports with this convention will have to be pre-processed or fixed in the "Clean" step.