[MaterialDatePicker] Added Support for a Spinner Mode

Context:

One of the modes supported from the older AppCompat Date Pickers was a Spinner mode.

This mode allowed users to use a set of dialers/spinners to select individual year/month/day directly.

Source: https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/ui/controls/pickers

It would be great to have MaterialDatePicker support such a mode, to align with use cases where it because difficult for a user to input an exact date, without having to scroll back in the Calendar View or Input a Text Entry Field.

Example Use Case:

Is a user wants to select a particular month, from a given range of months:

In this example, if the user wants to select March 2018, having a spinner to do so, would lead to a faster experience than the Calendar View.

Describe alternatives you’ve considered The alternative is to use the old DatePickerDialog which has support for the Spinner Mode.

Additional context Source: https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/ui/controls/pickers

[ruzicka1911]

I came here because my real world users are working in the warehouses, where they need to enter expiration dates. The effectivity is worse when they use the new MaterialDatePicker versus the old one with spinners. Could you also add support for the spinners to new MaterialDatePicker. Thank you.

[mobiRic]

Came here to find that my issue already exists, but is almost 2 years old.

It was asked why one would prefer the old style:

• I came here because my real world users are consistently entering incorrect dates of birth into a real world medical app. (the app was originally built with MaterialDatePicker)

This is direct User Experience that I’m seeing; and these users are having a very poor experience, so we are tossing this control from our app. Being a major fan of Material code, I’d much rather use this library than something else, but that is not an option.

tl;dr - the reason is that users don’t know how to use this control