Just out of curiosity, what’s your reason for needing the dates in a specific format?
Is it:
for display purposes?
because you need a consistent format in the data editor so that the values will work properly in other computed columns?
some other reason?
If for display purposes, then you’re almost certainly wasting your time. Individual user devices will always format and display date values according to their own device and regional settings. If you want to enforce a specific format, then the only way to do that is to convert all dates into strings.
If for use in the data editor - if you wanted to use dates to build relations, for example - then usually the best approach is to first convert the date values into numeric or string representations, which will ensure that “what you see is what you get”. An important thing to be aware of is that when you look at a date value in the Glide Data Editor, all you are seeing is your browsers interpretation of the underlying value. And that will vary from browser to browser, device to device, and timezone to timezone.
The reason I originally needed a different format was to see the Day of the Week (Mon, Tues, etc.). I mistakenly thought that if I had that format specified in the data editor, that was how the date was stored internally in Glide, and would not work for column matching, etc. That supposition turned out to be unfounded.
However, I did find that Glide does not like dates that are not formatted as text when doing relations. When I finally started doing the relation with a date in a template column, my relation started working correctly.
In my working table, I was trying to use the date column to determine if this was a duplicate entry. Once converted to a text string, the relation started working and finding true duplicates.
A similar trap exists with Number type columns. Again, it’s important to be aware that what is displayed in the GDE and what is actually stored underneath are not necessarily the same. For example, you might have a math column with 2/3, you format it with 2 decimals, and Glide displays 0.67. But internally, Glide is storing that as 0.666666..... And of course that can result in very difficult to find “bugs” if you start making assumptions about the values. For this reason, it’s often a good idea to use functions like trunc or round with math columns, or run them through template columns to “lock” the value.
