No support for nodate with online items

[ac-jorellanaf]

Hello. I am trying to make my online items have the biblatex n.d. string in the bibliography whenever the date field is not set (even if the urldate one is), but the end result is a set of closed parenthesis where the date (or nodate literal) should be.

Thank you for your help!

[ac-jorellanaf]

Found a very rudimentary workaround. I could not manage to use the nodate literal in BibLaTeX, but I was able to spot why the online bibliography entry wrote () when a date was not assigned. I re-defined the online bibliography driver to include a check if the year field is undefined. Since the original literal would not make this check, it would print the parentheses even if the date was not defined.

Anyways, here's my modified code.

\DeclareBibliographyDriver{online}{%
  \usebibmacro{bibindex}%
  \usebibmacro{begentry}%
  \usebibmacro{author/editor+others/translator+others}%
  \setunit{\adddot\addspace}%
  \iffieldundef{year}%
  {%
  	\printtext[parens]{n.d.}%
  }%
  {%
  	\printtext[parens]{\usebibmacro{date}}%
  }%
  \setunit{\adddot\addspace}%
  \usebibmacro{title}%
  \setunit{\adddot\addspace}%
  \printlist{language}%
  \setunit{\adddot\addspace}%
  \usebibmacro{byauthor}%
  \setunit{\adddot\addspace}%
  \usebibmacro{byeditor+others}%
  \setunit{\adddot\addspace}%
  \printfield{version}%
  \setunit{\adddot\addspace}%
  \printfield{note}%
  \newunit\newblock
  \printlist{organization}%
  \setunit{\adddot\addspace}%
  \iftoggle{bbx:eprint}
    {\usebibmacro{eprint}}
    {}%
  \newunit\newblock
  \usebibmacro{url+urldate}%
  \setunit{\adddot\addspace}%
  \usebibmacro{addendum+pubstate}%
  \setunit{\bibpagerefpunct}\newblock
  \usebibmacro{pageref}%
  \newunit\newblock
  \usebibmacro{related}%
  \usebibmacro{finentry}%
}

This would print (n.d.) if the year of an online entry is not defined. There should be a better implementation, but I'm only a newbie. :)

[Iizuki]

This StackExchange answer contains a working xpatch workaround. Maybe it will prove useful in fixing it here too.

[ntonnaett]

According to the IEEE reference guide there shouldn't be a date at all: First Name Initial(s) Last Name. “Page Title.” Website Title. Web Address (retrieved Date Accessed).