Showing posts with label likejanuary. Show all posts
Showing posts with label likejanuary. Show all posts

Monday, March 26, 2012

Formatting the date on report

Reporting Services 2005 (SQL Server 2005 CTP V 9.00.1187.00)

I have a date field and I want to format it on a report like:

January 9, 2006

Seems to me that should be pretty simple. But I can't find the correct format code. If I look at the textbox properties and go to the format tab, there is an option for Date, but there are only 3 choices:

1/9/2006 9:47 AM

Monday, January 9, 2006

1/9/2006

If I choose custom I found that Y gives me:

January 2006

and M gives me:

January 09

This is rather frustrating. I'm sure I could modify my source SQL to get each part of the date and past it together, but I would think a good reporting tool would give me the option on how to format the date, so I don't have to always modify the SQL. I've searched for help on the different format options and I can't find any.

Any help would be very much appreciated.

Thanks.

Well, I finally figured it out, with the help of some obscure posting on another forum. I now use format:

MMMM dd"," yyyy

interesting that you have to use MMMM, not mmmm and you have to use yyyy, not YYYY.

Now I could not find this anywhere in the documentation. I'm sure it must be there, but where? Does anybody know? I'm sure I'm going to have other formatting issues and I really don't want to have to search through forum postings on the internet to find crumbs of clues to figure out things that I think should be easily found in the products documentation. I'm sure it's me. It's gotta be right in front of me, or I did something wrong when installing and I don't have the correct documentation. (but then why can't I find it at MSDN?)

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You can find documentation about these custom .NET format strings (e.g. MMMM and yyyy) on MSDN: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/cpguide/html/cpconcustomdatetimeformatstrings.asp

-- Robert

|||Thanks!