unpacking

[Paul Foraker]

I'm building a stack that is a data entry app for a daily journal. Once the
day's entries have been posted (emailed to myself), I want to store them in
the stack. I came up with a scheme of prepending "j" to the seconds
representing the day and using that as the name of a custom property. No
problem storing that. When I retrieve it in a script, however, it's always
empty.

on unpackTheData jDate -- in seconds
  put "j" before jDate
  put empty into tJournal
  put the jDate of this stack into tJournal
  -- do "put the" && jDate && "of this stack into" && tJournal -- didn't
work
  put the jDate of this stack into tJournal
  if tJournal is empty then
    delete char 1 of jDate -- j
    convert jDate to long date
    answer "Sorry, there's no journal for" && jDate &"."
    exit to top
  end if
  -- ...
end unpackTheData

I'm passing the seconds for a date I know exists, and I can execute code
similar to the above in the Message Box and it works fine. In the script,
however, tJournal is always empty.

I thought maybe it was a data-typing error, but this works in the Message
Box:

put empty into tJournal
put "2/29/08" into jdate
convert jDate to seconds
put "j" before jDate
put the jdate of this stack into tJournal
put tJournal

Any suggestions?

Thanks,

-- Paul