Date format in CSV

[Good Friend]

Date format in CSV is coming as MM/DD/YYYY. I'm trying for the format YYYY-MM-DD. Tried different ways and its not working for me. Any inputs or workaround will be appreciated. Thanks.

[sjohnson]

When I had a similar problem, I used something like this to force the date into the correct format

Code Select Expand

_year(cast([Date], date))
+ '-' +
_month(cast([Date], date))
+ '-' +
_day(cast([Date], date))

Not the most elegant solution, but it worked.

[Good Friend]

Thanks Johnson for your response. Tried your code and it isnt working as expected. I'm using current_Date as date and backend is SQL server and the result is coming as 2041.

[sjohnson]

Good Friend,
Sorry the code didn't work for you. 2041 is the sum of the year, month, and day. Any chance your code looks something like this?

Code Select Expand

_year(current_date)
+
_month(current_date)
+
_day(current_date)

If the date separators ('-') aren't included in the Data item expression then the result is evaluated mathematically since the '+' operator is being used for concatenation and all the parts are numeric.

If you replace '+' with '||' in the above code

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_year(current_date)
||
_month(current_date)
||
_day(current_date)
then you should get '2026115'.

If you include the date separators in the original code above

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_year(current_date)
+ '-' +
_month(current_date)
+ '-' +
_day(current_date)
then you should get '2026-1-15'.

Combining both suggested changes yields

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_year(current_date)
|| '-' ||
_month(current_date)
|| '-' ||
_day(current_date)
which will also return '2026-1-15'.

Having said all that, I just noticed that the code I suggested will only return a single digit for month for any month before October and you requested MM. I have another, inelegant, solution for that. The code looks at the month value and concatenates a '0' if it is less than 10.
With date separators:

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_year(current_date)
|| '-' ||
if (_month(current_date) < 10)
then ('0')
else ('')
||
_month(current_date)
|| '-' ||
_day(current_date)returns 2026-01-15

Without date separators:

Code Select Expand

_year(current_date)
||
if (_month(current_date) < 10)
then (0)
else (null)
||
_month(current_date)
||
_day(current_date)returns 20260115

To summarize

• Both || and + can be used for concatenation. Using the + operator to concatenate can result in unexpected addition when all values are numeric.
• Data formatting for csv/Excel Data can be a bit of a pain in my experience.

[Good Friend]

Thanks again for spending time on this. Tried your logic but somehow it is not working as expected for CSV. I got a workaround for CSV with the below logic but when you export it to CSV you will have something like =" 2026-01-15 " and got to format it little bit to show it as 2026-01-15. Below is the Code

Code:
'=" ' + cast(extract(year, current_date), varchar(4)) + '-' +
(if (extract(month, current_date) < 10) then ('0') else ('')) + cast(extract(month, current_date), varchar(2)) + '-' +
(if (extract(day, current_date) < 10) then ('0') else ('')) + cast(extract(day, current_date), varchar(2)) + ' "'