16. System-Assigned Dates and Times ↑

c. Date Picked

The phrase Date Picked can be used as both a label and a type.

A Collection should never have more than one field of this type.

This field is left blank until a user ‘picks’ a particular note, at which point Notenik assigns the current date and time to the field.

This field is system-maintained, and is not directly editable by the user.

The field is generally displayed below all user-editable fields, and may be separated from these other fields by a divider.

The Note menu contains a Pick Note function, as well as an Unpick Note function. These will be applied to the currently selected note as viewed on the Display tab. These changes are made outside of the normal editing process, and so the note in question should not be in Edit mode when these menu selections are made.

Also see the randompick parm within the Custom URL Scheme for a way to select a random Note, and then set the Date Picked for that note.

The Collection menu also contains a function to Clear All Picks, which will reset all picked notes to an unpicked status (with blank dates picked).

When you Change the Sort Sequence for your Collection, you will have an option to sort your Collection by Date Picked.

Note that if you search for the word pick beneath the Help menu, you will see all of the available menu options that I have just described. This can be a handy shortcut, if you have trouble recalling exactly where these are all located within the menu structure.

This field might be useful in a couple of different ways.

• Simply checking for the presence of a value can be used to distinguish picked notes from unpicked notes.

• Sorting by this value could be useful in some circumstances, such as when generating an RSS file showing the latest picks first.