In one of my Django projects that use MySQL as the database, I need to have a date fields that accept also "partial" dates like only year (YYYY) and year and month (YYYY-MM) plus normal date (YYYY-MM-DD).

The date field in MySQL can deal with that by accepting 00 for the month and the day. So 2010-00-00 is valid in MySQL and it represent 2010. Same thing for 2010-05-00 that represent May 2010.

So I started to create a PartialDateField to support this feature. But I hit a wall because, by default, and Django use the default, MySQLdb, the python driver to MySQL, return a datetime.date object for a date field AND datetime.date() support only real date. So it's possible to modify the converter for the date field used by MySQLdb and return only a string in this format 'YYYY-MM-DD'. Unfortunately the converter use by MySQLdb is set at the connection level so it's use for all MySQL date fields. But Django DateField rely on the fact that the database return a datetime.date object, so if I change the converter to return a string, Django is not happy at all.

Someone have an idea or advice to solve this problem? How to create a PartialDateField in Django ?

EDIT

Also I should add that I already thought of 2 solutions, create 3 integer fields for year, month and day (as mention by Alison R.) or use a varchar field to keep date as string in this format YYYY-MM-DD.

But in both solutions, if I'm not wrong, I will loose the special properties of a date field like doing query of this kind on them: Get all entries after this date. I can probably re-implement this functionality on the client side but that will not be a valid solution in my case because the database can be query from other systems (mysql client, MS Access, etc.)