Change WPF Calendar control day name format

Question

I am currently using WPF Calendar control. The Day names are displayed as Su, Mo, Tu, etc. But I want those to be displayed as Sun, Mon, Tue, etc.. I found there is no data template property to achieve this one.

Any suggestion will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Answer 1

I've looked into this and unfortunately, I don't think that you will be able to achieve what you want.

To start with, I found the StringFormat to show three character day names in the Custom Date and Time Format Strings page at MSDN:

StringFormat=ddd

Then I thought that you might find a solution for the rest of your problem in the Custom date format for WPF Calendar CalendarItems post. So, adapting the idea from @Quartermeister, I could tried the following:

<Calendar>
    <Calendar.CalendarButtonStyle>
        <Style TargetType="primitives:CalendarButton">
            <Setter Property="Template">
                <Setter.Value>
                    <ControlTemplate TargetType="primitives:CalendarButton">
                        <primitives:CalendarButton>
                            <TextBlock Text="{Binding Day, StringFormat=ddd}"/>
                        </primitives:CalendarButton>
                    </ControlTemplate>
                </Setter.Value>
            </Setter>
        </Style>
    </Calendar.CalendarButtonStyle>
</Calendar>

As you can imagine, I was way off because this answered a different problem. So I went back to MSDN to find the default ControlTemplate for the Calendar control to experiment further. If you look at that ControlTemplate, you will see a Style named CalendarItemStyle.

In that Style is a ControlTemplate and in its Resources section, you will see a DataTemplate with the key {x:Static CalendarItem.DayTitleTemplateResourceKey}. Finally, in that DataTemplate, you will see the TextBlock that is responsible for displaying the day names:

<TextBlock Foreground="#FF333333"
                   FontWeight="Bold"
                   FontSize="9.5"
                   FontFamily="Verdana"
                   Margin="0,6,0,6"
                   Text="{Binding}"
                   HorizontalAlignment="Center"
                   VerticalAlignment="Center" />

I increased the size of the day names, so we can be sure that that is the correct TextBlock. (Ignore the odd looking Buttons at the top - they are just like that because I didn't copy their ControlTemplates):

Now if you look at the Binding in that TextBlock, you will see that unfortunately, it is set to {Binding}. This means that it is using the whole data bound value, rather than setting a particular StringFormat on a DateTime object. This means that we cannot use a StringFormat because the data bound value is already a string.