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Date Expression - Text Label vs. Text Input?

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Posted on by audrieFCT

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I have used the same function for a text label and a text input control. But the returned values are different. I have two questions:

1. Why are the formats different if the expression is the same? (The only difference with the top one is that it has a prefix of
"Date/Time: " & ) - I literally copied the expression from the top text box to the bottom one, and only deleted the prefix.
See screen shot below to understand what I mean by variance :
--Label has regular time,
--Input Box has military time, and
--Label has AM PM and Input Box doesn't

2. Is there anything special I need to do in order to submit the input value (bottom one shown in image) to a date column in SharePoint (right now it doesn't seem to be working)?

Notes:

--We are using these dates to log items from paper (so we can't use created and modified times on SharePoint)

--I'm not using the Power App templates, I'm patching the data down to SharePoint. i.e. Patch() function.

Thank you in advance for your help.

Time Variance.PNG

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AndyPennell Microsoft Employee on at

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If you always want 12-hour time in US format, use a formula of Text(Now(),"mm/dd/yyyy hh:mm:ss am/pm")

I cannot explain why one is different to the other though, I get 24-hour time by default for both on my machine.

(Sorry I dont know anything about submitting dates to SP).

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rgruian Microsoft Employee on at

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Can you please list here the exact expressions for your two controls? I can see one of them, the other one is unclear to me.

One thing to note is that date/time values in PowerApps are not text/strings. They are numeric, and flow through the dataflow graph from / into controls as such. At the point where they need to be presented in text form, they are projected to strings. This typically happens in one of three main ways:

1. Explicit projection using the Text function. The format is specified in the formula. E.g. label.Text = Text(dt, "mm/dd/yyyy hh:mm a/p")
2. Implicit projection via type coercion from date/time to text. The format is fixed and culture-specific. For en-US, it's typically "mm/dd/yyyy hh:mm:ss a/p". For example: label.Text = Now()
3. Implicit projection by a control that manipulates date/time values. An example would be a calendar control.

I am trying to understand what your formulas are, so I can see which of these cases actually kick in (in your case).

Regarding your second question, I suspect the date/time value for SharePoint needs to be properly typed. You should be able to use the DateTimeValue or DateValue functions (as appropriate) to convert text, for example from a TextInput control, to a date/time value compatible with SharePoint.

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audrieFCT 987 on at

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Here are the two expressions my apologies for being unclear. These expressions plus the screen shot should further clarify:

In the label:
Text( "Date/Time: " & Now(), "mm/dd/yyyy hh:mm:ss" )

In the Text Input Box (Default value that the consumer of the form can edit):
Text(Now(), "mm/dd/yyyy hh:mm:ss" )

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AndyPennell Microsoft Employee on at

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The Label one needs to do the concatenation outside the Text function:
"Date/Time: " & Text(Now(), "mm/dd/yy hh:mm:ss am/pm")

Now() is not a string: it returns a date. Whenn you add it to the string it converts it and loses its "date-ness".

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audrieFCT 987 on at

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LOL - that's funny because that is the one that was working as I expected! Let me try that and see if I now have two problems.

Thank you - will post back here as soon as I give it a try.

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rgruian Microsoft Employee on at

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What Andy pointed out is correct. string & date will coerce the right hand side (a date numeric value) to a string using a predefined format. If you need to use a specific format, you need to perform that projection from date/value to text yourself.

In the label:
"Date/Time: " & Text(Now(), "mm/dd/yyyy hh:mm:ss")

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audrieFCT 987 on at

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That works perfectly Andy!! Thanks so much to both of you.

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