Date/time format appearance at survey input phase, not concerned about calculation in output

elpinguino

Hi S123ers,

I keep circling back to this article, but it doesn't exactly answer my question I think... https://community.esri.com/t5/arcgis-survey123-blog/dates-and-time-in-survey123/ba-p/895528

This here really bothers my team. They want to see the date as DD/MM/YYYY when they are filling out the form.

What I gather from the linked article is that a) there has to be a second/new field created to calculate the desired date time format. You can't do it in the same field. b) that still doesn't fix the problem of the date appearing in the wrong format at the time the user fills out the survey, only afterwards.

How do I fix this? Is it something I control on my computer locale or agol locale?

I'm working in Survey123 connect. The user accesses the survey on the desktop via web browser.

jcarlson

You can set the default locale of your survey in Survey123 Connect on the settings tab. Unfortunately, XLSForms uses the IANA language subtag registry, which only has a generic "English" language entry. There are a few variants in that list, but Survey123 only looks for actual languages, not variants, so there doesn't seem to be any support for English locales that have other date/time formats.

Personally, I have my browser and machine locale settings to always show DD/MM/YYYY, and most places it works. In Survey123 web forms, though, there seems to be a setting in the form that overrides my settings.

A really hacky workaround would be to set your form's default locale to something other than English. But then your month names and weekdays will all be in that language, and if you use multilingual forms, it's kind of a non-starter.

Date fields are really just integers under the hood, so it seems like it ought to be pretty trivial to set a default format for the fields to display. I would submit this as an Idea!