Altair® Monarch® Server

 

Offset Expressions in Macros

The date/time macros (yyyy, mm, etc.) have been extended by defining "offset expressions" that may be tacked onto the macro name to compute an offset from today's date.

Note: Offset expressions are available for file naming only; they are not available for distributions, etc.

The syntax is as follows:

&[macro{.sign{count}units}]

  • The braces ({ }) enclose optional portions of the syntax.

  • macro is a macro name (e.g., yyyy).

  • sign is + (plus) to add to the current date or - (minus) to subtract from the current date.

  • count is an optional integer count.

  • units specifies the units to be added or subtracted: d for days, m for months or y for years.

Note: The offset expression, if present, must be separated from the macro name by a period (.).

Syntax for Offset Expressions

The following table provides examples of syntax for offset expressions:

Example

Meaning

&[dd.+1d]

The day portion of tomorrow's date.

&[dd.+d]

Synonymous with &[dd.+1d]. The count defaults to 1.

&[mm.+1d]

The month portion of tomorrow's date.

&[yyyy.+1d]

The 4-digit year portion of tomorrow's date.

&[dd.-1d]

The day portion of yesterday's date

&[mm.+7d]

The month portion of the date one week from today

&[mm.+1m]

The month portion of the date one month from today.

&[yyyy.+1y]

The year portion of the date one year from today.

&[yyyy.+2m+15d]

The year portion of the date 2 months plus 15 days from today. More than one offset expression may be concatenated as shown to affect sums of different units.

Note: The offset expression may be used with any of the date/time macros, including the time macros (hh, mi, and ss), although they have no effect on the latter, since &[hh.+1d] would give the same result as &[hh]. Likewise, one may make a macro like &[mm.+4y], but it is equivalent to &[mm] because adding or subtracting an integral number of years to a date can never affect the month.