Thanks, Mark. That worked perfectly. I added a new line to say

ldpickup = Thisform.inputDate && right after the first line,

and it got past the error message. Now I just need to get the
rest of it right. I appreciate your help, although I thought I
had a date field in the first place. I built the text box with
a builder dialog and specified it as a date field. Also, the
value property of the field was {} when I viewed it from the
form designer. So I don't know why this works, but it does and
that's enough for now.

Merci and Danke.