Thanks a lot cfajohnson,
you rule

But now I have another question

I've got my attributes evaluated, however I need to consider if multiple attributes are passed through, as a single string

Basically, I need to tokenize the parameters string

This is what I have so far:

...
evalParams()
{
  output=""
  input="$1"
  set -A attr $(echo ${input} | tr ',' ' ' )
  
  n="0"
  while [ "${n}" -lt "${#attr[*]}" ];
  do
    eval "p=${attr[${n}]}"
    output="${output} ${p}"
    n=`expr $n + 1`
  done
  
  echo ${output}
}
...
## this is actually loaded from file, but for the purpose of an example it's fine :)
parameters="`date +%m%d`,`date +%H%M`"
...
params=`evalParams ${parameters}`