DATE ADD

The DATE ADD statement adds (or subtracts by adding a negative value) a number of time units (years, months, days) to a specified date/time field, to determine a future (or past) date/time. For example, you may want to add 10 days to the DUE DATE field to determine when a 10-day discount period for prompt payment expires.

    ••••• DATE ADD ••• •••••••••••••••••••••• ••• •  ••• •••••••••••••••••••••• •••
    (1)            (2) (3)                    (4)(5) (6) (7)                    (8)

Using the Statement

The unit (parameter 5) indicates the units of the source field. The result is returned in the destination field.

When you add “months” to a date, the destination “day” does not change unless the resulting date is beyond the end of the month. In other words, if you add one month to February 28, you get March 28; however, if you add one month to January 31, you get February 28 (except in leap years, when you get February 29). When you add “years” to a date, the destination month and day do not change, even in leap years.

Restrictions

The destination field must be a date/time field type and the source field must be a numeric field type. Also, results can be unpredictable if you are using a date field without a century component. Confirm that your System Administrator has set up the Pivot Year environment variable to avoid unexpected results.

Execution Error

If the destination field is null, a runtime error occurs.

Related Statements

DATE BTW

Example

The following example calculates a discount date 10 days in the future and displays it on an image:

          SET      TAR WORK DISCOUNT DATE         =  TAR INVOICE DUE DATE
          DATE ADD TAR WORK DISCOUNT DATE         5      10
          DISPLAY  TAR WORK DISCOUNT DATE         (AT APPEARANCE #    )

Note that the INVOICE DUE DATE field is moved into a work field called DISCOUNT DATE before the computation is performed so that the INVOICE DUE DATE field is not modified.