By default, all my site-collections were using the en-US locale. This can be seen in site actions --> site settings --> regional settings. The short date-time format for this locale is "M/d/yyyy" (i.e. 10/24/2008).
I was given the task of trying to figure out how to change the short date-time format for all my site collections to "yyyy-MM-dd" (i.e. 2008-10-24).
My first instinct was to see if there was any settings within SharePoint itself in the Central Admin or Site Settings which allowed me to do this. No luck.
Next, I figured that SharePoint must get the regional & locale settings from the Regional and Language Options on the server (start --> control panel --> Regional and Language Options), so I went and changed the Short date format here. FYI, this just sets the values in the registry under HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\International. Again, no luck.
At this point, I figured I would turn to code and use the CultureAndRegionInfoBuilder class which is new for .NET 2.0. (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.globalization.cultureandregioninfobuilder(VS.80).aspx). Here is the code I tried to run on my server (as an administrator):
try
{
CultureAndRegionInfoBuilder.Unregister("en-US");
}
catch (System.ArgumentException)
{
//The specified custom culture 'en-US' was not found.
//ignore
}
catch (Exception)
{
throw;
}
CultureAndRegionInfoBuilder carib = new CultureAndRegionInfoBuilder("en-US", CultureAndRegionModifiers.Replacement);
carib.GregorianDateTimeFormat.ShortDatePattern = "yyyy-M-d";
carib.Register();
Again, this didn't seem to work.
Turns out that SharePoint for some reason uses the default short date for the locale it is set at. So even though I was changing the ShortDatePattern, it wasn't looking at it.
After a bit of research I found this post http://sharepointex.blogspot.com/2007/09/how-to-modify-date-format-in-sharepoint.html which gave me the information I needed.
From the help given in this post, what I decided to do was to try to find a locale/regional setting that had the short date I wanted (fr-CA seems to work) and then use the CultrueAndRegionInfoBuilder to copy all the locale settings from en-US to it. After this, I changed the locale for all the site collections and their sub-sites to use this customized fr-CA culture which is basically en-US using fr-CA's short date format. I deployed it as a feature, the main functiona for my code is below:
public void ChangeLocale(SPSite site)
{
try
{
CultureAndRegionInfoBuilder.Unregister("fr-CA");
}
catch (System.ArgumentException)
{
//The specified custom culture 'fr-CA' was not found.
//ignore
}
catch (Exception)
{
throw;
}
CultureAndRegionInfoBuilder carib = new CultureAndRegionInfoBuilder("fr-CA", CultureAndRegionModifiers.Replacement);
carib.LoadDataFromCultureInfo(new CultureInfo("en-US"));
carib.LoadDataFromRegionInfo(new RegionInfo("US"));
carib.GregorianDateTimeFormat.ShortDatePattern = "yyyy-M-d";
carib.GregorianDateTimeFormat.DateSeparator = "-";
carib.Register();
CultureInfo ci = new CultureInfo("fr-CA");
using (site)
{
for (int i = 0; i < site.AllWebs.Count; i++)
{
using (SPWeb web = site.AllWebs[i])
{
web.Locale = ci;
web.Update();
}
}
}
}
public void RemoveLocale(SPSite site)
{
try
{
CultureAndRegionInfoBuilder.Unregister("fr-CA");
}
catch (System.ArgumentException)
{
//The specified custom culture 'fr-CA' was not found.
//ignore
}
catch (Exception)
{
throw;
}
CultureInfo ci = new CultureInfo("en-US");
using (site)
{
for (int i = 0; i < site.AllWebs.Count; i++)
{
using (SPWeb web = site.AllWebs[i])
{
web.Locale = ci;
web.Update();
}
}
}
}
Note: if you are in a farm environment, this feature needs to be locally activated on all servers so that the custom carib culture can take effect server wide.