Macro Changing Date Format for September Dates

Darin Williams February 28, 2024

BLUF: Page Properties macro change all September dates from "Sep" to "Sept" and it is breaking my Table Filter operation. Is this a known problem? Is there a known solution?

I'm using the Page Properties / Page Properties Report macros to capture page details, run them through a Table Filter macro, and display the results on a dashboard. Some of the page details I'm grabbing are dates, e.g., "Planned" and "Actual." I use a Table Filter macro to filter the results based on "Actual" dates, for example, I might use a range of 01 Jan 2023 to 31 Mar 2023 to capture Q1 2023. Everything works well--I see everything I expect to see in Q1 2023. However, it also shows anything with an "Actual" date in September...of any year. I couldn't find any help online, so I began poking around looking for anything special about September dates. Today I found an anomaly.

We use // to capture dates on our Confluence pages. So a page might have an "Actual" date shown as 15 Feb 2023 or 01 Jun 2023 or 16 Sep 2023. However, when we use the Page Properties and Page Properties Report macros to use that information on a dashboard, the same dates are shown as 15 Feb 2023, 01 Jun 2023, and 16 Sept 2023. Notice the difference in the September date? The macro is changing the date format from "Sep" to "Sept," but it doesn't do that for any other month of the year...all others are in a "Mmm" format. Perhaps unrelated (but I'd bet related), my Table Filter macro is ignoring September dates and including them in my results even if they don't fall with the date range I'm specifying. For Q1, I get everything from January thru March...plus September. For Q2, I get everything from April thru June...plus September. And so on.

Perhaps this is an old problem and there's an easy solution--it would be my lucky day!

Thanks in advance for any insights.

1 answer

2 votes
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February 28, 2024

Hi @Darin Williams ,

Not sure what may be wrong here but you may check the language settings: as far as I know, the "Sept" variant is used for English(UK).

So you may check that both for your Confluence and for your browser the language is set as English(US).

Darin Williams February 28, 2024

Thanks for that. I'll look into it, but the same server and browser that are seeing "nn Sep nnnn" stored by the "//" function and consumed by the page properties macro are seeing "nn Sept nnnn" produced by the page properties macro. If it were a locale setting, I suspect I'd see "Sept" consistently.

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February 29, 2024

You may also try to build your report using the Table Excerpt/Table Excerpt Include macros instead of the Page Properties/Page Properties Report macros:

  • Collect your tables by labels
  • Show the required meta data (page title, for example)
  • Tick the "Show as a report" option

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