Should the value-date attribute be required?

Standard Management 3.0.0 Major Upgrade Proposals
#1

The value-date attribute of an value element is not marked as required in recent IATI versions at iatistandard.org (for example transaction value -> value-date).

To perform currency conversion correctly, and hence, cross IATI source comparison, this date would preferably be required. I’m interested to know everyone else’s opinion on this.

p.s.

In the old docs it was marked as required. Which makes me wonder if it was made non-required on purpose.

http://iatistandard.org/103/activities-standard/transaction/value/

I also checked the IATI 1.04/1.05/2.01 xsd schema files, the value-date attribute is missing there for most occurrences of the value element.

TAG session on reviewing the need for a next minor or major IATI standard upgrade
TAG session on reviewing the need for a next minor or major IATI standard upgrade
#2

Hi Vincent

It was never changed on purpose. In my view this is a bug which crept in between 1.03 and 1.04. We are allowed to fix bugs as and when they occur. However this does have implication for those publishers not currently using this attribute - see the dashboard breakdown here. I will take this to our next Technical Team meeting to discuss how best we can proceed.

Bill

#3

I think this was reported in error, and should be closed as invalid. value/@value-date has always been required. It was marked as required at v1.03. I think the fact it is now marked as optional is a bug with the reference site, rather than the schema. I’ve created a github ticket for that.

The only time @value-date is optional is in the fss element, which is completely unused anyway according to the dashboard. Apart from that, @value-date is required.

This proposal was on the list for discussion at the TAG, so I suggest closing (after checking what I’ve put here is correct!) to remove it from future discussions.