German date format with QuickAdd

[Joe_Heckel]

I have problems with formatting the VDATE dates in QuickAdd.
As you can see in the screenshot below I want the date to be formatted DD.MM.YYYY
With the {{DATE}} function this works as expected, but with {{VDATE}} it still uses YYYY-MM-DD format.

Has anyone else experienced this and can offer a solution?

Thanks a lot in advance!

[anon45210282]

Is the natural language dates plugin installed?

Is it case sensitive?

datum (as in your YAML variable), rather than Datum?

[Joe_Heckel]

Yes, natural language dates plugin is installed.
And the variable isn’t case sensitive. I tried it with datum rather than Datum but without any changes.

[anon45210282]

I don’t use QuickAdd, but as no one else has replied … does the separator make a difference?

DD.MM.YYYY

DD-MM-YYYY

[Joe_Heckel]

Unfortunately, no.

[jmiller]

I experienced the same.

The format syntax does not seem to be the issue here.

It seems you must not call VDATE multiple times with different formats. With the first call, the date value is asked via input dialog and saved to the variable (DATUM in your example) in formatted text format.
Any subsequent VDATE-Calls run on this text (in your case “YYYY-MM-DD” from the first call in the frontmatter) and because the variable DATUM is not a date object, any subsequent uses “ignore” the new/different formats you added.

Excerpt from my own example:

---
uuid: "{{VDATE:datum,YYYYMMDD}}{{time:HHmmss}}"
...
date: {{VDATE:datum,YYYY-MM-DD}}
...
created: {{VDATE:datum,YYYY-MM-DDTHH:mm:ssZ}}
modified: {{VDATE:datum,YYYY-MM-DDTHH:mm:ssZ}}
...
---

## Tasks

- [ ] {{FIELD:reporter}} {{VALUE:title}} ➕ {{VDATE:datum,YYYY-MM-DD}}

Result: The first format “YYYYMMDD” is used for all occurrences of VDATE:datum...

I haven’t found a way to use the same date input value with different formats within the same template.

Are we using VDATE in a wrong way?