FILEMAKER: Introducing Date Functions

From Dwayne Wright - www.dwaynewright.com

Date functions are used ( for the most part ) to calculate events. They can also be used to breakup a date to capture just the day, name of the day, week, month and year. The date field is designed to hold a data string representing a single date such as 11/22/2004. When you define a field as a date field, you are making a commitment to that data type.

The date field has quite a bit of background programming to handle all the unique things you can do with date information. The date field can process chronological information from year 1 to year 4000 and is setup to have 8 characters plus characters to separate the month, day and year information. The eight characters FileMaker uses for data related dates are 2 for day, 2 for month and 4 for year.

Date calculations have to have a reference point and that reference date is 1/1/0001. So when you create a calculation that tells you when your car payment is due, all the calculations work from 1/1/0001.

Date ( month ; day ; year )
Day ( date )
DayName ( date )
DayOfWeek ( date )
DayOfYear ( date )
Month ( date )
MonthName ( date )
WeekOfYear ( date )
WeekOfYearFiscal ( date ; startingDay )
Year ( date )
YearName ( date ; format )

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© 2007 - Dwayne Wright - dwaynewright.com

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