ddwrt:FormatDate is reverting date parts

Question

I'm using a custom XSLT file to format the oob created column to not show time, only date.

I have this code :

  <xsl:template name="FieldRef_ValueOf.Created"
                match="FieldRef[@Name='Created']"
                mode="DateTime_body">
    <xsl:param name="thisNode"
               select="." />
    <xsl:value-of select="ddwrt:FormatDate($thisNode/@Created,1036,1)" />
  </xsl:template>

As you can see, I specify the 1036 (French) culture.

However, this produces the date in the wrong format : month/day/year (01/10/2012), instead of the expected day/month/year (10/01/2012).

Why does this method behaves like this? How can I correct this?

FYI, if I set up the 1033 culture, the date is now in the correct French format.

In fact, the day and month seems to be swapped.

[edit] I found a KB entry at Microsoft. The XsltListViewWebPart seems to buggy. Unfortunately, the suggested workaround are not very satisfying.

Answer 1

Haven't tested, but this might work:

ddwrt:FormatDateTime(string($thisNode/@Created), 1036, 'ddMMyyyy')

Edit

This worked for me:

<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:x="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/dsp" version="1.0" exclude-result-prefixes="xsl msxsl ddwrt" xmlns:ddwrt="http://schemas.microsoft.com/WebParts/v2/DataView/runtime" xmlns:asp="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ASPNET/20" xmlns:__designer="http://schemas.microsoft.com/WebParts/v2/DataView/designer" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" xmlns:msxsl="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:xslt" xmlns:SharePoint="Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls" xmlns:ddwrt2="urn:frontpage:internal" xmlns:o="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office">
    <xsl:include href="/_layouts/xsl/main.xsl"/>
    <xsl:template name="FieldRef_DateTime_body.Created" match="FieldRef[@Name='Created']"  mode="DateTime_body" ddwrt:dvt_mode="body">
        <xsl:param name="thisNode" select="."/>
            <xsl:value-of select="ddwrt:FormatDateTime(string($thisNode/@Created), 1036, 'dd/MM/yyyy')" />
    </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

Answer 2

The problem is that $thisNode/@Created is represented in french format (10/02/2013 for Feb 10th, 2013), but the FormatDateTime() function expects it to be the other way round (i.e. understands October 2nd). This is in particular annoying, because it tries to tolerate "obvious errors" like 31/12/2013, which becomes correctly Dec 31st (which ShPt beleives is 12/31/2013) on any system.

Thus,

FormatDateTime('10/02/2013', nls, 'dd+MM') = '02+10'
FormatDateTime('31/12/2013', nls, 'dd+MM') = '31+12'

whatever nls is (1033 or 1036 or ...), but only on french (or german, or slovene, ...) systems. However it does not give these contradictory results on US-installed ShPt servers (with SPWeb's locale 1033).

Got it?