Enforce datetime value format in Power apps

HK SharePoint Admin
1 min readDec 6, 2023

I need to save the date time value in MS SQL server. The format for datatype “Date” and “Datetime” are:

  • DATE - YYYY-MM-DD
  • DATETIME - YYYY-MM-DD HH:MI:SS

The problem is, since Power Apps is a web application, the date format is depends on users’ browser and PC setting. If user input a value 6/12/2023. Do you know it is 12 June 2023 or 6 Dec 2023?

In order to enforce the format, I used the Text() function.

According to Microsoft:

By default, Text uses the language of the user running the app. The Language function returns the language tag for the current user. You can override this default value by supplying a language tag for the third argument to Text.

I added “en-GB” as the 3rd argument. Sample as below:

Text(Today(),”[$-en-GB]dd/mm/yyyy”,”en-GB”)

Then use DateValue or DateTimeValue to convert the text back to date or datetime format:

DateValue(Text(Today(),”[$-en-GB]yyyy-mm-dd”,”en-GB”));

DateTimeValue(Text(Now(),”[$-en-GB]yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss”,”en-GB”));

Finally, you can insert the value into SQL with Patch function. For example:

Patch(‘WorkLog’,Defaults(‘WorkLog’),{logtime:DateValue(Text(Today(),”[$-en-GB]yyyy-mm-dd”,”en-GB”))})

Hope it helps you. I found it so inconvient to convert a date value to text and then convert again to date. Let me know if you find better approach!

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