How to format a date in VisualForce?

Question

In Salesforce, if I'm binding a date into a VisualForce page, how do I apply custom formatting to it?

Example:

<apex:page standardController="Contact">
  <apex:pageBlock title="Test">
      <p>{!contact.Birthdate}</p>
  </apex:pageBlock>                   
  <apex:detail relatedList="false" />
</apex:page>

This will output a date in the default format:

Thu Jul 01 09:10:23 GMT 2009

How do I get it (for example) into dd/mm/yyyy format, like this:

01/07/2009

(Hopefully this is a fairly easy question, but to get the Salesforce community going on here I figure we need a few easy questions.)

score 51 · Accepted Answer · edited Mar 06 '12 at 00:48

51

<apex:outputText value="{0,date,MM'/'dd'/'yyyy}">
    <apex:param value="{!contact.Birthdate}" /> 
</apex:outputText>

link to full doc: http://www.salesforce.com/us/developer/docs/pages/Content/pages_compref_outputText.htm

edited Mar 06 '12 at 00:48

donjay

150
6

answered Mar 25 '10 at 16:43

Ryan Guest

6,080
2
33
39

3

Using this approach you can use the full JAVA date formatting classes to format: datetimes, numbers and currency. – Daveo Apr 10 '10 at 08:05
Good to know I've been looking for this for a while! Thank you – Meow Nov 18 '10 at 01:23
2

Can you post a link for documentation? I'd like to know what the first two parameters in apex:outputText (0,date) mean. Thanks. – Pablo Venturino Jun 23 '11 at 20:56
1

How do you get this formating to take the users timezone into account and display that time in their local timezone instead of GMT? – Keith Mancuso May 20 '13 at 22:17

score 3 · Answer 2 · answered Jan 21 '14 at 00:53

The answer seems to depend on context. I have one VF page which pre-populates the Subject line of a task with the value of NOW(). To record it with the user's Locale settings, I included methods in the controller to format date and datetime fields, along these lines:

  Datetime myDT = Datetime.now(); 
  String myDate = myDT.format();

But just now in another VF page where I'm merely displaying a datetime field, I confirmed that SFDC handled formatting based on the user's Locale setting. That was in this context, where cm.CampaignMembers is a variable from the controller:

    <apex:column>
      <apex:pageBlockTable value="{!cm.CampaignMembers}" var="cmp" >
        <apex:column headerValue="" value="{!cmp.Campaign.Name}" />
        <apex:column headerValue="" value="{!cmp.Status}"  />
        <apex:column headerValue="" value="{!cmp.FirstRespondedDate}" />
        <apex:column headervalue="" value="{!cmp.CreatedDate}"  />
      </apex:pageBlockTable>
    </apex:column>

How to format a date in VisualForce?

2 Answers2

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