Check date in future and a Wednesday

The following Google Apps Script is designed to check that a date submitted via a Google Form is both in the future and falls on a Wednesday. This was developed as part of a newsletter submission process to help validate information and inform a user when they had not followed the instructions. It has been developed for UK dates and may need adjusting for your own time zone.

Google Form question asking for a date to be entered.

The Code

The trickiest part of this process is that the data coming from the Form is not recognised as a date specifically. So if you try to create a date object from it immediately you end up with an Americanised version that switches the day/month around. We therefore have to split it apart:

var splitDate = submissionDate.split("/");

var day = splitDate[0];

var month = splitDate[1];

var year = splitDate[2];

Then piece it back together, remembering that JavaScript dates start at '0' for 'January' hence we subtract '1' from the month:

var newSubmissionDate = new Date(year, month - 1, day);

Next we want to look at extracting the day of the week from this date, so we can pop the days into an array and use 'getDay()' to return a value between 0 to 6 in order to work it out:

var weekday = ["Sunday", "Monday", "Tuesday", "Wednesday", "Thursday", "Friday", "Saturday"];

var dayOfTheWeek = newSubmissionDate.getDay();

var day = weekday[dayOfTheWeek];

With a little bit of formatting we can tidy up our submitted date into something like Wednesday 4 December 2024:

var niceSubmissionDate = Utilities.formatDate(newSubmissionDate, timeZone, 'EEEE d MMMMM yyyy');

Which takes us to our final step of comparing dates and checking the day of the week:

if ((newSubmissionDate < todaysDate) && (day != "Wednesday")) {

    console.log("Form date is in the past and not a Wednesday.");

} else if (newSubmissionDate < todaysDate) {

    console.log("Form date is in the past.");

} else if (day != "Wednesday") {

    console.log("Form date not a Wednesday.");

} else {

    console.log("All is good.");

};

Download

Check date in future and a Wednesday folder download (please use 'File' > 'Make a copy' for your own version of each item).

	function getFormData(e) {
	// get Spreadsheet TimeZone
	var timeZone = SpreadsheetApp.getActiveSpreadsheet().getSpreadsheetTimeZone();
	// get Form data
	var formValues = e.namedValues;
	// get specific values from Form ******************
	var submissionDate = formValues["The Date"][0];
	console.log('submissionDate is: ' + submissionDate);
	// get specific values from Form ******************
	// get todays date
	var todaysDate = new Date();
	// fix date format from Form so workable and look nice ***********************
	var splitDate = submissionDate.split("/");
	console.log("splitDate is: " + splitDate);
	var day = splitDate[0];
	var month = splitDate[1];
	var year = splitDate[2];
	// subtract '1' from month as JavaScript starts at '0' for 'January'
	var newSubmissionDate = new Date(year, month - 1, day, todaysDate.getHours(), todaysDate.getMinutes());
	console.log('newSubmissionDate is: ' + newSubmissionDate);
	// fix date format from Form so workable and look nice ***********************
	// create array of days of the week and use 'getDay()' method to determine which one
	var weekday = ["Sunday", "Monday", "Tuesday", "Wednesday", "Thursday", "Friday", "Saturday"];
	var dayOfTheWeek = newSubmissionDate.getDay();
	var day = weekday[dayOfTheWeek];
	console.log("Submission day is: " + day);
	// create a nicely formatted date which could be communicated with an end user
	var niceSubmissionDate = Utilities.formatDate(newSubmissionDate, timeZone, 'EEEE d MMMMM yyyy');
	console.log("niceSubmissionDate is: " + niceSubmissionDate);
	todaysDate.setHours(0, 0, 0, 0);
	console.log("todaysDate with hours is: " + todaysDate);
	if ((newSubmissionDate < todaysDate) && (day != "Wednesday")) {
	console.log("Form date is in the past and not a Wednesday.");
	} else if (newSubmissionDate < todaysDate) {
	console.log("Form date is in the past.");
	} else if (day != "Wednesday") {
	console.log("Form date not a Wednesday.");
	} else {
	console.log("All is good.");
	};
	};

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