URL convention for date range

Question

What would be the accepted convention for displaying a date range in a friendly URL?

For example, in a time tracking application. Instead of using the database's primary key for a specific pay period in the URL, I would like to use something more easily distinguishable to the user.

http://www.mytimesheet.com/11-1-2009-11-14-2009
http://www.mytimesheet.com/period-beginning-11-1-2009

Neither of those seem to cut it, but maybe I'm just being overly critical.

Answer 1

Have you considered ISO format dates, especially in their compact form: YYYYMMDD, then it should be possible to have:

http://example.com/dates/20091101/20091131

Specifically I don't think there is any accepted convention for this.

Edit: this is about routing as well...

Answer 2

I'd say it's up to you, but I like the idea of

http://foo.com/bar/from/2008/
http://foo.com/bar/from/2008/10/
http://foo.com/bar/from/2008/10/02

Or, it can be combined with something like /between/2008/10/2009/10 and such.

Answer 3

Personally I think this is the sort of data that is best POSTed, rather than used to specify a route.

(sometimes if the solution seems broken in this way, then maybe the approach is incorrect.)

However, if you really want to specify dates, perhaps you should consider a format that is more likely to be understood in a consistent way in all cultures, such as yyyy-mmm-dd (e.g. 2009-nov-11)

Answer 4

I'd either use something like:

http://www.mytimesheet.com/start/11-1-2009/end/11-14-2009

or

http://www.mytimesheet.com?start=11-1-2009&end=11-14-2009

But what daniel says, you could convert this in a post so you hide it altogether, if that is possible.