United States Congress Data Dictionary of Legislative Documents

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Element Name:	action–date
Description:	The date or dates on which a particular floor action occurred. There may be two dates associated with an action, the regular calendar date and the legislative day. Sometimes the textual descriptions of these dates do not divide neatly into two parts, for example, the full date may be written as “February 3 (legislative day, January 30), 1995”. Therefore, the ACTION DATE is just data characters, to be entered in any fashion necessary. For purposes of searching and for date comparisons, the real values of the date and the Legislative Day may be stored in the attributes for this element: date and legis-day in the machine-readable “YYYYMMDD” format. The year is the first four digits, followed by the 2-digit month, followed by the 2-digit day. For the month and day, zero fill as necessary to produce two digits. Formerly, the *I46 locator code.
DTD Content Model:	(#PCDATA)
Attributes:	Name: date Description: The date of an event named in the element, such as the attestation date (element attestation date and action) for an amendment document. Value(s): CDATA Default Value: #IMPLIED Name: legis-day Description: For elements which describe a date, this attribute holds the designated Legislative Day, as opposed to the actual calendar date. The Legislative Day is only recorded when the Legislative Day differs from the calendar date. Value(s): CDATA Default Value: #IMPLIED
Parent Elements:	vote-metadata