Tip: Evaluating DateTime with Type Helper

Dates. What a nightmare. Day/Month/Year? Month/Day/Year? 24 hour time? 12 hour time? It’s almost enough to make you sympathetic to the idea of decimal time…almost.

Type Helper codeunit to the rescue. It has a method to allow you to evaluate the text of a date, time or datetime into the corresponding type according to a format that you specify.

AVariant := DateResult;
FormatString := 'ddMMyy';
if TypeHelper.Evaluate(AVariant, DateText, FormatString, '') then
  DateResult := AVariant

The first parameter is of type Variant. The actual data type that the variant contains determines whether the method will attempt to evaluate to a date, time or datetime. Unfortunately because that parameter is passed by reference (var) you have to declare a variant variable and then assign its value to another variable afterwards – but apart from that its pretty self explanatory.

See https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/standard/base-types/custom-date-and-time-format-strings for info about the formats you can use. Don’t do what I did and miss the distinction between lowercase ‘m’ (minute) and uppercase ‘M’ (month) *facepalm*