[capink]

Originally Posted by chaley

I tried it using an action that stores the book_id to a column. It worked very nicely. I will try the book_vars variant later.

Good to know.

Originally Posted by chaley

Comparing date strings:

if format_date($last_modified, 'iso') > format_date($#mydate, 'iso') then

Never thought about comparing iso strings. Nice trick.

Originally Posted by chaley

However, I think a good solution is to add the 'timestamp' format to format_date, returning a floating point timestamp. I would also change format_date() to allow a timestamp as the first argument (the "date") permitting conversion of timestamps to date strings. This would do what you need and also facilitate arithmetic on dates. Example:

program:
	t = format_date($last_modified, 'timestamp');
	strcat(t, ' -- ', format_date(t, 'yyyy MMM ddd hh:MM:ss'))

Result: 1616695611.0 -- 2021 Mar Thu 18:03:51

One possible problem with both implementations: the dates lose their timezone. I don't see that as a big deal.

Sounds like a perfect solution. The timezone thing is not important IMO. I will remove the to_timestamp() from the next version as yours is much better.