Undocumented Merge Field list for Date and Time

@martinc , I see you replied to someone Facebook post with this information, and someone mentioned Liquid Templating. I see that the merge fields here are applying functions to the dates.

The question here is can these functions be used for other types of merge fields, and is there other functions that can be applied? Or is it just date specific at the moment?

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@martinc - these are GREAT!! I do, however, have questions

  • Is this a complete list? If not, can we get one?
  • Are these supported?
  • Are these documented officially anywhere?
  • Can we share this complete list publicly with clients and prospects?
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Thanks Camille!

This is the most up-to-date list of available time/date merge fields. I asked if there was anything else like this and there isn’t.[quote=“Camille_Shieff, post:4, topic:721”]
Are these supported?
[/quote]

These were handed over to me yesterday by a senior QA engineer. Support hasn’t been officially notified of this functionality. I notified the Training team this morning and they are going to take it from here. These were developed some time ago, but never made it into the UI, so they were never officially documented.[quote=“Camille_Shieff, post:4, topic:721”]
Are these documented officially anywhere?
[/quote]

This will be where they are documented. They will likely be mentioned in a help article or future release note, but it will link to this thread.[quote=“Camille_Shieff, post:4, topic:721”]
Can we share this complete list publicly with clients and prospects?
[/quote]

I would wait until Support has been trained on the functionality…which should happen today. I’ll let you know.

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They are not available for other types of merge fields. Also, I added a better explanation of the “functions” and “formatters” at the top of the post. They can only be entered manually.

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@martinc - are we free to share these yet? I don’t want to jump the gun, but I’d like to get these out via a blog post.

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Sorry, yes. Support has been trained on this feature.

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So, these can only be used on the “today” date? If I have a date stored in a custom field on my contact record it seems like I can not add any function or format to it.

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I had the same thought yesterday, but I realized that I was making things harder on myself. Here’s my solution (it may not work for you, but it definitely does what I need it to do):

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Merge field for name of next month?

We have monthly billing on products and send out billing reminders close to the end of every month. For example, “This is your invoice for October…” would be sent on Sept 27th. I spend hours manually changing all the months forward in the email copy every month.

I am wondering if there is some kind of secret merge field code that can automate it such that it populates only the name of the next month. Can the merge field for current month be altered somehow to produce “October” when in the month of September, for example?

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You should be able to do something like this

~today.date_and_time|plus_months(1)|custom(m)~

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Can we use these formatters when merging other date fields?
I have several custom date fields, and I’d love to use the .date|long formatter when merging those into emails.

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I’m kinda wondering where this stuff was as I was pulling my hair out with my frequency thingy. :crazy_face:

This is extremely helpful. Thank you SO much!

Can you tell me the syntax to display just the day of the week three days from now? For example, on Monday, display “Thursday” (as in “This expires Thursday.”)

Thank you!

I don’t think you can, with these anyway, whittle it down to displaying just the day’s name but the math would be:

Although, PlusThis does have a date math and format option that would provide you with just the day.

I’m trying to determine how to use these types of fields in a decision.

My client has a renewal date 11/1/19, if today’s date is 11/1/18 (6mths prior to 11/1/19) I’d like to send them to the “Renewal Email sequence” if not I’d like to send them to the “Newsletter” sequence.

Thanks!
-Danny

@martinc these merge fields appear to not work any more. Has support for this been discontinued?

Hey, @mjfleming. I tested a couple of them and they worked for me. Which one in particular didn’t work?

@martinc that’s weird. I’m using this one:

~today.date_and_time|medium~ - Mar 15, 2016 11:42:21 AM

I embedded them in a note template that gets applied from a campaign. It use to work but does not appear to be now. How are you doing itr?

Closing this topic. These fields should still work in emails, but are no longer officially supported. This functionality will be replaced by a much more powerful template scripting language shortly.