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Upcoming changes to how date and time formats are handled in MacroView DMF and MacroView Message

Colin Titmuss
  • Updated

How the display of date & time and other locale information are handled in MacroView DMF, MacroView Message and products based on MacroView DMF such as MacroView Case and Matter is changing in new releases from 1 October 2020.  

What is changing?

The Date & Time Locale and Time Format settings under DMF Options are being deprecated.

The Date & Time Locale and the Time Format settings currently in DMF were introduced in 2013 to allow users to choose whether the date & time format and time zone offset should reflect their local machine settings or the settings on the SharePoint server.  Prior to these settings being introduced, MacroView DMF and MacroView Message displayed a mix of date formats with some dates formatted according to the local machine setting and others dates formatted according to the SharePoint server configuration.  This setting, although giving the user more control over the display of dates, can still result in variations when the local user profile properties don't align with what is currently applied for that user in a given SharePoint site.  

In order to simplify date and time formatting the Date & Time Locale and Time Format settings under DMF Options are being deprecated and dates and times will always be displayed using the user-specific locale and format settings defined in SharePoint, or where no user-specific settings are configured, the locale and format of the SharePoint site.

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This means that the format and value of culture-sensitive fields such as dates, numbers and currencies in MacroView DMF and MacroView Message browse mode will always be displayed the same as they are in the browser.

This change will come into effect in all versions of MacroView DMF, MacroView Message and products such as MacroView Case and Matter that are based on MacroView DMF released after 1 October 2020.

Why is this changing?

When displaying date & time and other locale information the format and time zone offset can vary between each SharePoint site and these values may not always be accurate if the local user profile properties don't align with what is applied for that user in a given SharePoint site.  

As MacroView DMF and Message has not supported SharePoint 2010 since version 8.5.1074, and SharePoint 2013, 2016, 2019 and SharePoint Online have built in support for user-specific locale settings, these out-of-the-box SharePoint settings can be used in place of the Date & Time Locale and Time Format settings previously used in DMF and Message.

This means that the format and value of culture-sensitive fields such as dates, numbers and currencies in DMF browse mode will always be the same as in the browser with the following exceptions.   

  • Search results will always be formatted according to the user’s local machine settings.
  • The ‘Last Used’ date in the Recent File List will always be formatted according to the user’s local machine settings.
  • MacroView DMF allows users to configure (via the registry) custom columns to display in the Recent Files List.  Any custom culture-sensitive columns configured to display in the Recent File List will be formatted according to the regional settings of the site where the file resides. 

The above means that a file shown in the recent files list can have different formats for the ‘Last Used’ and custom date fields but provides consistency with the properties dialog in terms of date field formatting.

How will this impact you?

If you are not upgrading from an earlier version of MacroView DMF or MacroView Message, or you previously had the Date & Time Locale setting set to “Server”, you do not need to do anything.  Dates and times will continue to be displayed as they were previously (excluding the exceptions listed above).

If you are upgrading from a version MacroView DMF released prior to 1 October 2020 and had the Date & Time Locale setting under DMF Options set to “User” or “Local Machine”, the format of displayed dates and times may change.  You can configure your user-specific locale preference in SharePoint in order to retain the previous display format if required.