DateTime Column displayed as LocalTime?

[Paul]

Hello,

We have an application with SQL Server running in one location and then clients in different timezones using that data.  All datetimes are stored as UTC values.  For display we want them in local date/time.  How do we do that in GridView?

For example:
A grid showing a list of events with an updated_date column.  We want those event dates/times as local time.  Can .formatstring be used to somehow set ToLocalTime()?

Thanks,
Paul

[Dobry Zranchev]

Hi Paul,

You can use CellFormating event of the grid and there you can format the datetime as you want.

Kind regards,
Dobry Zranchev

[Martin Vasilev]

Hello Paul,

Thank you for the question.

RadGridView does not support implicit UTC to Local DateTime conversion. You have two ways to work-around this:
- use CellFormatting event to change the cell displaying value as Dobry Zranchev mentioned.
- if you are using DataTable to specify DateTimeMode for the DateTime column.

However, we will consider adding such a property in GridViewDateTimeColumn as well for some of the feature releases. I have updated your Telerik points for bringing our attention to this. Do not hesitate to contact me again if you have any other questions.

Regards,
Martin Vasilev
the Telerik team

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[Dan]

I am doing this with the cellformatting method and the issue I have is the cellformatting is called everytime a click in the grid happens so it constantly subtracts the time offset from the current value, in essence it counts down the datetime on every click.

if((e.CellElement.ColumnInfo.HeaderText == "FallOff Date" ||
e.CellElement.ColumnInfo.HeaderText == "Created On" ||
e.CellElement.ColumnInfo.HeaderText == "Completed On"
) && e.CellElement.Value != null)
{
DateTime utcDate = DateTime.SpecifyKind((DateTime)e.CellElement.Value, DateTimeKind.Utc);
e.CellElement.Value = utcDate.ToLocalTime().ToString("MM/dd/yyyy hh:mm:ss tt");
}

[Dan]

I have solved this. I was updating the Value which changes the underlying data object. For display only I should use the Text field of the cell.

e.CellElement.Text = utcDate.ToLocalTime().ToString("MM/dd/yyyy hh:mm:ss tt");

[Dess | Tech Support Engineer, Principal]

Hello Dan,

Thank you for contacting Telerik Support.

Changing the cell value in the CellFormatting event is not a recommended approach. However, you can customize the CellElement.Text property as you have already found out. Please refer to our Formatting Cells help article for additional information. I think that our GridViewDateTimeColumn help article will be quite useful about formatting the date via the GridViewDateTimeColumn.FormatString.

I hope this information helps. Should you have further questions, I would be glad to help.

 

Regards,
Desislava
Telerik