Sample Macro

This macro first parses the date into individual parts: Month, Day and Year. It then creates a ‘Date/Time’ command string and then uses the ‘Run Macro In Variable’ to perform the conversion of the date string into a DateTime variable.

Every macro command can be viewed two different ways: as it appears in the Script Editor and in ASCII format as it appears in the Direct Editor. In the Direct Editor the ‘Date/Time’ command looks like this:

This macro uses the ‘Variable Set String’ command to put this information into a string that can be used by the ‘Run Macro in Variable’ command. There is one thing to take care of, however.

When variables such as %Month%, %Day% or %Year% are used in the ‘Variable Set String’ command they are converted to the content of the variable. In our example, %Month% is converted to 11, %Day% is converted to 12 and %Year% is converted to 2012. This is what we want for these values. But if we use %dtResult% for the result variable it will be converted to the content of %dtResult% which, in this case, will cause the macro command to fail. To avoid the automatic conversion of a variable use \c25 in place of the % characters. So the result variable becomes \c25dtResult\c25, like this:

Once the command in string format is in a variable the ‘Run Macro in Variable’ command puts the date into the variable %dtResult%.