Jul 21 2008
Using a “Magic Date” Value in Prompts
In the first post on designing universe prompts I talked about the idea of having a default date value present in a prompt. In case you don’t want to read the entire post, here is the executive summary:
You can’t do it, sorry.
At the end of that post I mentioned something called a “magic date” that I frequently use in my universes to get past this limitation. That’s my subject for today.
Problem Definition
I have a date prompt in my universe. I would like to be able to provide a default value of today’s date. This would allow my users to click-n-go on the report without having to update the date value each time. It is also essential for scheduled reports, which is something I didn’t really touch on last time. When I schedule a report, I have to provide values for every prompt. I have a long series of posts on how to create some dynamic date objects that can be used for scheduling, but those were not prompts.
In a nutshell: I need a way to accept a prompt value and convert it to today’s date for user convenience and for scheduling. Can I make that happen?
