Mitigating Risks Of Inconsistent Date Handling In Sharepoint Solutions
Inconsistent Date Handling in SharePoint Can Introduce Risk
Inconsistent date handling refers to the use of varying date formats and logics across SharePoint components like regional server settings, client machine settings, custom solutions, and external system integrations. When dates are parsed, interpreted and rendered differently in SharePoint environments, it introduces various data, functionality and usability risks.
Regional and language differences on servers and end-user machines can lead to dates rendered in mm/dd/yyyy, dd/mm/yyyy or other formats. Custom solutions built without considering SharePoint’s internal date handling can parse and save dates incorrectly. Integration with external systems transmitting dates in their own formats can also contribute to inconsistencies.
Inconsistent date handling manifests itself in issues like incorrect sorting and filtering of date fields, failures in business logic relying on date values, and general confusion due to misinterpreted or misrepresented dates. These risks increase with more components integrated with SharePoint passing date data around.
Why Inconsistent Date Handling Occurs in SharePoint
Regional and Language Settings on Servers and Client Machines
SharePoint servers and end-user machines have their own regional settings around display formats for dates, times, currencies and numbers. Date formats vary widely – mm/dd/yyyy and dd/mm/yyyy being most common but others like yy/mm/dd also used globally.
SharePoint user interface layers usually render dates aligned to the regional settings of the client machine. However, the data stored and manipulated at the back-end database and service layers are not always contextualized for regional differences at scale. This causes interfaces to display dates in mismatched regional formats.
Custom Solutions Built Without Considering Date Handling
SharePoint’s out-of-the-box behavior is to store dates in a standard yyyy-mm-dd format at the database layer regardless of regional settings in effect. However, custom solutions often rely on developer’s own regional contexts for parsing and manipulating dates within business logic.
Custom workflows, scripts, Web Parts and other components can be programmed to parse dates incorrectly or save them in inconsistent formats. With multiple client-side and server-side customizations in play, varying assumptions around date handling lead to high inconsistencies.
Integrating With External Systems Using Different Date Formats
External enterprise systems feeding data into or accessing data from SharePoint often bring their own formats and logics around handling dates. ERP, CRM or financial applications relying on certain date contexts get integrated with SharePoint’s out-of-the-box or customized handling behaviors.
During integration phases, the data interchange pipelines are to designed to accommodate the different date requirements. But failovers do occur frequently leading to mismatches between the source and destination date data.
Problems Caused By Inconsistent Date Handling
Incorrect Data Sorting and Filtering
SharePoint views are used extensively to sort lists and document libraries chronologically or filter them based on date fields. When date values are stored without standard yyyy-mm-dd ISO 8601 format, the sorting and filtering logic does not work properly.
Regional dd/mm/yyyy formats cause day and month portions to be interchanged leading to incorrect chronological order. Custom formats with separators, characters or missing portions cause parsing failures throwing sorting off. Inconsistently handled dates get ordered randomly or completely omitted from filter results.
Errors in Business Logic and Calculations
SharePoint workflows, custom formulas, scripts and other logic relying on date values are prone to break with inconsistent handling. Wrong date formats or incorrectly parsed portions passed into calculations cause inaccurate results or failure scenarios.
An example is calculating employee service period in months based on start and end dates in employment list. Wrong date parsing or formatting can output random or illogical service durations. Scheduling tasks, setting notifications or deadlines also require robust date handling.
Confusion for End Users
End-user interfaces generated by regional settings, custom solutions or external integrations often display dates in mismatched formats based on their own interpretations. This causes significant confusion around what dates imply, especially when sorting or filtering chronologically.
Regional settings can show dates in dd/mm/yyyy format but custom solution formats them as mm-dd-yy in outputs. Documents or items not appearing in expected date sequence or filters not showing intended results leaves users baffled.
Best Practices to Mitigate Risks
Set Uniform Regional Settings
Configure all SharePoint servers, site collections and sites to have the same regional settings to maximize consistency of default date handling.
Set region to a neutral culture like English United States for all components. This promotes yyyy-mm-dd date formats by default for core behaviors like storage, sorting and calculations.
Use ISO 8601 Date Format (yyyy-mm-dd)
Enforce storing, transmitting and formatting dates in standard yyyy-mm-dd pattern across custom solutions. Align integrations with external systems also to ISO 8601 for consistency.
Override regional settings or contextual assumptions in custom logic and workflows. Parse dates into distinct localized variables but save back in standard format. Convert dates to/from ISO format during external data interchanges.
Validate and Normalize Dates in Custom Solutions
Use centralized utility functions to validate date strings from regional UI layers for accurate portions. Then parse into normalized yyyy-mm-dd format containing valid year, month and day portions before feeding to business logic.
Detect culture and format variations upfront. Convert dates from external systems also into yyyy-mm-dd strings. Saving standardized forms prevents downstream date errors.
Localize Date Formatting in UI Using Utilities
While storing dates in yyyy-mm-dd format, retain flexibility to render them in user contextual format for readability. Detect regional client culture and use utilities to format dates as per needed culture.
For example, use lt;/Date(yyyy-mm-dd)gt; syntax to save clean ISO dates. But output dd/mm/yyy format in French UI using a formatting utility, without altering actual value.
Example Code for Normalizing Dates
Sample C# utility class for centralizing date parsing and normalization:
public static class DateUtil {
public static string NormalizeDate(string rawDate, string inputFormat) {
DateTime parsedDate;
var culture = CultureInfo.CurrentUICulture;
// Validate and parse date using input format
if (DateTime.TryParseExact(rawDate, inputFormat, culture,
DateTimeStyles.None, out parsedDate)) {
// Convert parsed date back to ISO 8601 string
return parsedDate.ToString("yyyy-MM-dd");
} else {
return null; // Invalid date
}
}
}
Sample usage:
string rawDate = "02/05/2023"; string isoDate = DateUtil.NormalizeDate(rawDate, "dd/MM/yyyy"); // isoDate value will be "2023-02-05"
Testing Dates And Troubleshooting Issues
Verify Sorting, Filtering and Calculations
Perform comprehensive testing of date sensitive operations like chronological sorting, filtered date ranges and business calculations.
Use both machine regional dates as inputs and verify if outputs are ordered, grouped and computed accurately. Such testing uncovers any date parsing issues.
Check Logs for Date Parse Exceptions
Enable diagnostic logging in SharePoint, custom solutions and external system interfaces to log actual date parsing and processing failures.
Exceptions while converting strings to dates or formatting dates for outputs provide clues around which areas are impacted by date inconsistencies. The offending date portions, formats are logged.
Get User Feedback on Date Presentation
Actively seek user feedback on date representation issues that impact their usage context like chronological sorting or filtering of items.
Capture use cases, UI screenshots and inputs that demonstrate inconsistency symptoms for the user. Trace those scenarios back to how dates are handled across various layers.
Following Standards and Governance Around Date Handling
Document Standards for Date Usage
Draft, continually evolve and enforce a set of date handling standards for SharePoint solutions – formatting, parsing, localization, testing, logging etc.
Mandating standards like always using ISO-8601 yyyy-mm-dd dates with utility-based localization prevents haphazard date treatments across layers.
Review Solutions to Enforce Compliance
Perform technical design and code reviews on SharePoint customization projects to ensure compliance to date standards early on.
Verify elements like adherence usage of centralized parsing utilities, localized output formatting, absence of regional assumptions in business logic, logging of exceptions etc.
Provide Guidance on Date Best Practices
Educate developers, architects and other IT teams on significance of inconsistent date issues and need for disciplined handling based on institutional best practices.
Creating awareness on how customizations or integration decisions can unknowingly introduce date deviations is key for uptake of standards and governance.
