Date Capture - Hability to write or choose older dates easily

[achs]

Hi! I'm currently working on a form where my coworkers will have to capture historic dates, like date of birth of people born 80 years ago, they are struggling having to move trought so many years on the calendar, they would preffer just write the date against of moving into the calendar. 

At the beggining I decided to leave it as a text box, but it creates another issue as they might capture the date as YYYY/MM/DD, DD MM YY, DD MM YYYY, DD-MM-YYYY. Each person could have a different way of capturing the date or adding spaces, creating problems of standardization of the data and how to analyze it. 

Is there a way to allow to type the date instead of select it since the current date but keeping a date capture standard?

[fklotz · Accepted solution]

Are your users aware that they can make the calendar control work faster for them?  At least on iOS:

1. click the year and a scrolling year popup shows where they can scroll to the year of interest.  This may not be fast enough for them, though.

2. long press on the left arrow for year and they can watch the years go by very quickly. 

If neither of these are helpful enough, you could create an integer question for year (set the esri field type to null), and after they select the appropriate year, you could default the calendar control to today's date, but the year they selected.  Then they only need to set the month and day. You can use a range question or the numbers appearance with spinners for quick data entry of the year.  You could set a bind esri visible (or a relevant) on the calendar control so it does not show until the year is selected.