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Odd problem parsing dates

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Thomas asked on 23 Jul 2009, 12:49 AM

I'm running into an odd issue parsing dates when I set the culture. Here's the repro steps
1. Create a blank Telerik Web Application
2. On the Default.aspx page drop a RadScriptManager and a RadDatePicker
3. In the code behind, add the following method:

    
            protected override void InitializeCulture() 
        
            { 
        
                base.InitializeCulture(); 
        
                var culture = CultureInfo.CurrentCulture.Clone() as CultureInfo; 
        
                if ( culture == null ) 
        
                    return; 
        
                culture.DateTimeFormat.ShortDatePattern = "dd-MMM-yyyy"; 
        
                this.Culture = culture.ToString(); 
        
                this.UICulture = culture.ToString(); 
        
                Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = culture; 
        
                Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture = culture; 
        
            }

Notice that all I'm doing is cloning the existing Culture (which in my case happens to be en-US) and changing the default ShortDateTimePattern.

The effect of doing this is that the control will parse dates as if they are European dates instead of US dates. For example, entering 05012009 will result in 05-Jan-2009 instead of 01-May-2009.

14 Answers, 1 is accepted

answered on 24 Jul 2009, 03:15 PM

Hello Thomas,

I have answered to your support thread opened on the same matter. Here is a quote of the answer:

Hello Thomas,

Thank you for contacting us.

Unfortunately there is no easy way how to attain the required functionality. One possible solution is to override RadDatePicker and set DisplayDateFormat property. Hence you will need to use everywhere this control in your application. Thus the DisplayDateFormat will be set for each control used in the app. Nevertheless if you need to change the DisplayDateFormat depending on some condition, you still will need to set it for the control placed on the current page.

Let me know whether this helps.

All the best,

Sincerely yours,
Georgi Krustev
the Telerik team

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answered on 24 Jul 2009, 06:33 PM

Am I to also assume that the CultureInfo's DateTimeFormat.ShortDatePattern property is used in the parsing algorithm? That's a shame because the solution seems intuitive IMO but I can understand how that would cause a problem.

Unfortunately, this puts me into a rather ugly lurch as our application is used by numerous customers in multiple countries that themselves have offices in multiple countries where they want to standardize the date display which is why a skin won't work unless I jump through some serious hoops a try writing the skin file at runtime (bleh). It's that, or replace every single date control in the system with a derived version.

answered on 24 Aug 2009, 11:31 PM

I've come back to this issue on the date formats. In general, it is a PITA that there is no way to globally set the date format at run time. In fact, I ran into an interesting issue with changing the format. I notice that changing the format which is set at runtime does not take effect if you are using an expression builder and have compiled the app with aspnet_compiler. The only way I was able to force the effect to occur is by recompiling the app using aspnet_compiler.

I do not want to make a derived date control because there is plenty of subitems on the date control that I don't want to have to implement. It makes for a brittle solution.

I seem to remember way back in the day, it used to be possible to set the date format in the web.config file. Even that would be much nicer as I have many clients running off the same code base but with different parent web.config files.

In the end, we're going to have to set the date format using the code we use for security which enables/disables all the controls on the page. Even that may not work entirely as some of the controls may be buried in placeholders, grids etc. Not sure but I'll post again when I know.

answered on 31 Aug 2009, 04:36 PM

Hello Thomas,

The expected behavior of the calendar is to get the Culture from the page. If you explicitly set the culture of the control, the page's Culture will be overridden. If you set just the date format the input control will use the culture of the page. You mentioned for the DateFormat, DisplayDataFormat in one of your earlier posts. In general these properties uses the current culture to format the date, they do not override it.

I suppose that in order to achieve your goal you will need to set culture property of the Page. Thus offices around the world will open page with explicitly set culture.

Regards,
Georgi Krustev
the Telerik team

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answered on 01 Sep 2009, 03:07 PM

I do agree and therein is the issue. I have many dozens of date controls in my app. Most customers want a display date format of dd-MMM-yyyy for clarity when dealing with multiple cultures to avoid the confusion between m/d/yyyy and d/m/yyyy. The problem is that this obviously deviates from the ShortDatePattern on any culture. I want the ability to globally set that format in the web.config file or barring that at runtime. I cannot set it in a Theme because there are times when clients want to change that (e.g. some do want m/d/yyyy, some m/d/yy etc) and with many hundreds of clients, I want (and have) a single code base.

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Odd problem parsing dates

14 Answers, 1 is accepted