Find Contacts Where still working?

Shortcuts
1

Hi gang. I was working on a shortcut to have Siri announce the next birthday in my contacts. It was working a couple of weeks ago but not any more.

I’ve changed a bit but think it is not just me. I made a copy that finds the contacts, get details and show it.

This works when I pick First Name for example but not Birthday.

Can anyone tell me what I’m doing wrong please?

I hope I’m including the shortcut correctly:

https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/0b826b751d0c405b941624a7b27bccee

Thanks

2

I’m wondering if it might have been longer ago than a few weks if you are dealing with a 6 month period as per your shortcut. Birthdays are dates in the past so they are strictly speaking never upcoming … but I think Shortcuts is trying to interpret the request around anniversary … up to the end of the anniversary year. That last part I think is the root cause of your issue and why the custom shortcut is having issues returning to what you expect; and I agree it is a little frustrating if that is the case.

I’ve had a go at quickly throwing together something that I think will work based on my above assumption (based on a few checks, but I could be wrong about all this). Take a look and see if it is something you could adapt to work exactly how you want.

Hopefully, as you look through it will make sense, butfor anyone who wants a quick walkthrough details are below.

What it does...
  • Captures a period specfied in days.
  • Determines if it crosses the end of a year.
  • If it doesn’t cross it just grabs the birthday contacts in the period.
  • If it does cross it grabs the birthday contacts from tomorrow to the end of the year and then from the start of the year to the end of the period.
  • The groups it grabs it pulls out some birthday and name information as text.
  • The text is used to order the results chronologically (not birth date order).
  • The ordering text is split out to leave the birthdate and the name.
  • Each text entry is combined and passed to a show results.

Hope that helps.

3

That is perfect, works with my dataset and does indeed help. Thank you! I’ll share if I get it like I want and it may be useful to others.

Thanks Stephen!

4

Interesting that it sets the year to 1604 if you haven’t entered a year.

5

Can you elaborate? What is “it” and where are you seeing the year as 1604? I don’t have any examples that are coming from my contacts or the shortcut that I see matching year. :frowning:

If I know where you are seeing this and the source, I can maybe have a stab at they why and possibly even addressing it. :thinking:

6

That shortcut up above when I run it shows a year of 1604 for anyone in my contacts that I only have a month a day for in their birthdate.

7

It turns out that is just a default year.

It is about something other than contacts, but you’ll see the reference to Apple defaults.