Power Platform Community Forum Thread Details

Hello,

I have been building apps that are now being rolled out internationally within my organization.

What is the best date format to use, considering the submissions will come from US (mm/dd/yyyy) and elsewhere (dd/mm/yyyy) to ensure that it will pick it up correctly and transform as required?

I am using this, and hope this will work irrespective of device language and location settings?

Date: Text(Now(), "[$-en-US]mm/dd/yyyy")

PowerApps will submit date (together with other data) - Flow picks it up - Submits to a SharePoint list (into a date column).

Thanks in advance!

Categories:

Building Power Apps

Excellent question and difficult topic.

1) Time zones

If you use SharePoint as a data source, you may have issues with time zones. I believe that SharePoint does not have a real date format but just truncates a datetime. This means that when directly querying the data from different time zones you may see the date shift by one day (many posts on this topic in this forum). If you cannot use a better data source such as Azure SQL Database, then you may have to deal with this. One alternative is to store dates as text in ISO format 2018-05-15, which can be parsed without ambiguity by PowerApps and Flow as well. Flow does not have a date variable type and just converts from text or numbers.

2) Locales

I think the formula that you use should display today as 15/05/2018 for people with European and other similar locales, and 05/15/2018 for people with US and similar locales (and probably 2018/05/15 for people in some Asian locales). However I have found that depending on browser settings (at least this was the case with Chrome about a year ago), this may not always work as intended. I am not sure how PowerApps determines what a user's locale is. It may be the PowerApps server, it may be the browser/smartphone general settings. If you want to unambiguously display a date in a specific format for all users, then use the third parameter of the Text() function, but I seem to understand that this is not your intention.

Hope this helps.