Something not exactly right here with my toys...
Long story short: I need partial dates. As we don't have 'em yet I created my own a.Year, a.Month and a.Day (all strings; yeah, 53 July sounds nice, I like long summers). And an extra a.Date field (expression) that tests them with IsEmpty and aggregates them in the likes of 2012-xx-xx or 2012-04-xx or complete dates if info available.
Then I used to call this a.Date field in Rename, Move, Copy to create folders the likes of 2012-xx-xx - blablabla, etc. That used to work until recently (month - couple of months? I don't know I lost track). Well, as explained in the
wiki this (now) fails because the... well, smartness of avoiding empty, illegal folders takes precedence over the expression engine. So I get 2012-unknown [a.Month]-unknown [a.Day]. I'm curious why it evaluates stuff like that, why it's considered a problem even if only a part of the outcome is (supposedly) empty. Anyways.
Rewrote the whole thing with isEqual checking against the 'unknown' value and renaming works. But I have other problem now. If I display a.Date in MC, it shows 2012-00-00. That's not good, I want my '-xx' since it's a visual queue that I won't give up.
So I went from having one expression field that I could just call it in Rename, to having to use a different expression every time I do a rename involving these values. Any solution / thoughts to simplify this back?