Danish date is not formatted correctly in Xpages

Question

In our application we have implemented that all dates and values should be presented using the browsers locale.
However when selecting Danish as the locale/language in any web browser the date formatting is wrong.
We see no errors for English, Swedish, Norwegian formatting, only for Danish.
The dates are formatted as "20/08/15" but should be "20-08-2015"

The server is a Domino 9.0.1 version using Server Locale and when testing the locale output I see that it is serving "da". When changing to Browser Locale on server the setting do not change the date formatting.
This issue has been reported on our servers in different countries.

I have tried to locate an explanation and/or answer to our problem but failed.

The application has no locale specific formatting on any fields, view columns… and we'd like to keep it that way. Our application is run in different countries so not controlling the locale formatting is our preferred way. However we'd like to present the dates and numbers in the language specific correct way.

We do not explicitly use any Dojo components, only plain date fields and view columns in a view panel. We do not have any International Options set.

I have tried to set the locale as @Sven Hasselbach answer in another question but failed. Haven't tried his Xsnippet…

an example of header:

GET /demo/tradesec.nsf HTTP/1.1
Accept: */*
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, sdch
Accept-Language: da,sv;q=0.8,no;q=0.6,en-US;q=0.4,en;q=0.2,nl;q=0.2
DNT: 1
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10_4) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/45.0.2454.37 Safari/537.36
X-Chrome-UMA-Enabled: 1
X-Client-Data: CJe2yQEIo7bJAQicksoBCOeUygEI/ZXKAQi8mMoB

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Connection: Keep-Alive
Content-Encoding: gzip
Content-Length: 8956
Content-Type: text/html;charset=UTF-8
Date: Mon, 17 Aug 2015 07:59:43 GMT
Expires: -1
Keep-Alive: timeout=10, max=100
Tradechannel: Work_and_fun_professionally_done
X-Pad: avoid browser bug

Please advice, thanks!

/M

Answer 1

XPages is using the ICU4J library for date formatting. That library is using '/' as the separator for the Danish short date format.

So code like this:

com.ibm.icu.text.DateFormat.getDateInstance(
  com.ibm.icu.text.DateFormat.SHORT, 
      new java.util.Locale("da")).toPattern()

gives date patterns like:

en: M/d/yy
da: dd/MM/yy
sv: yyyy-MM-dd
nb: dd.MM.yy

You might try using the long date format instead:

da (long): d. MMM yyyy
output: 17. aug 2015
da (medium): dd/MM/yyyy
output: 17/08/2015

by setting dateStyle="long" on the converter.

Or if you do need to override the language-specific pattern for Danish then the code would be like:

<xp:viewColumn columnName="_MainTopicsDate" id="viewColumn3">
    <xp:viewColumnHeader value="Date" id="viewColumnHeader3"></xp:viewColumnHeader>
    <xp:this.converter>
        <xp:convertDateTime dateStyle="short" 
           pattern="${javascript: ('da' == context.getLocale().getLanguage())? 
              'd-MM-yyyy': null}">
        </xp:convertDateTime>
    </xp:this.converter>
</xp:viewColumn>