Change date format in table?

Question

Hi all,
I'm trying to make my first VB.NET iview and I need some help! I can already display the results of a RFC in a databound table, but now the dates are displayed in YYYMMDD format. How can I change this to a .NET date (DD/MM/YYYY)?
Thanks!
Liesbeth

Answer 1

What you want to do is a kind of fomating the data in the cells. One possible way is to subscribe to the ItemDatabound event of the Table and format the contents of the cell accordingly:
  Private Function ReformatDate(ByVal format As String)
    Return format.Substring(6, 2) + "/" + format.Substring(4, 2) + "/" + format.Substring(0, 4)
  End Function
  Private Sub Table1_ItemDatabound(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As SAP.Web.UI.Controls.Table.ItemEventArgs) Handles Table1.ItemDatabound
    Dim dateView As TextView = CType(e.Item.Cells(DateColumnIndex).TableCellContent, TextView)
    dateView.Text = ReformatDate(dateView.Text)
  End Sub
DateColumnIndex is the index of the column that has the date field.
There is an even easier tricky way to do it: If you databind the table at design-time, the framwork creates databinding expressions for the TextViews in the cells that look like
Text='<%# DataBinder.Eval(Container.Parent, "DataSourceRow.DataItem.Fldate") %>'
You can change this to contain your formatting function, e.g.
Text='<%# ReformatDate(CType(DataBinder.Eval(Container.Parent, "DataSourceRow.DataItem.Fldate"), string) %>'
You can change the expression either in HTML view or usign the DataBindings property editor of the cell's TextView. In this case of cause you don't need the Table1_ItemDatabound event handler.