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Old 08-24-2011, 02:33 PM
Nobodo Nobodo is online now
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Join Date: 08-19-2010
Location: Rural Douglas County, CO
Posts: 69
Demo update

I was taking a look at the UR demo for Journaling, which uses the supplied Journal.urd.

I noticed that the demo shows inserting a default journal item under January and having it nicely name the item "03" for January 3rd.
When I tried it myself, it inserted a journal item with title "8/24/2011 12:39 PM".
Of course, if you were keeping daily journal entries like in the demo that title would not be good.

So... not that I'm interested in keeping a journal but as a way to learn I took a look at how to have the 'Journal Entry' template create an item with a title like in the demo.
Looking at the "Title Expression" for a journal entry, it is set to "Date Created", and since the Date Created field is full date and time I can see why the item title gets created as it does. I'm going to guess that when this demo was created in 2006 either the "Date Created" field had different data in it or perhaps the template has changed since then.

So...
looking in the help file under index item "Title Expression" there is an article named "Custom Item Titles".
It explains a few limited functions and operators that can be used, but none of them would really help in this case.
Under the 'General Notes' is stated:
"Date/Time attributes referenced in a Title Expression will be formatted according to the Insert date/time as Miscellaneous option, which allows you to specify Custom %Y%m%d format to give date titles that are sorted by date in the Data Explorer pane."

That description has a link in it to 'Miscellaneous Options', which gives the actual breakdown of variable to use for different date formats.
What I ended up with is:
Leaving the "Title Expression" set to 'Date Created', and going into 'Tools' - 'Options' - 'Miscellaneous' and setting "Insert date/time as:" to Custom and the value
%d
This gave a very pleasing journal entry title as in the demo like
24

Ok, so obviously the video needs to be updated since it doesn't match reality, but it would be really nice if there were date formatting options directly in the "Title Expression". With the only date formatting option at a global level, that doesn't leave the option of having dates appear in multiple places within a database or even in separate databases with different formatting in each. If dates are ever inserted anywhere else in any databases, it is not likely at all that it would be desired for the dates to be formatted as %d, but if you want the titles of journal entries formatted like in the demo that appears to be the only option.

If this ability already exists in "Title Expression", how is it done? I tried a few possibilities but each just gave 'Syntax Error'.
My suggestion would be to add a new function that would allow a Title Expression to be something like
dateFormat([Date Created], %a %d)

I can also see where a substring function could be really useful, perhaps a few others.

Thanks,
Mark.

Last edited by Nobodo; 08-24-2011 at 02:56 PM.
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