Conflicts with short date and long date

[Ben01t]

Dear community,

I am working on a new Power App for managing training sessions, connected to several new Power Automate flows.

I was proud to present my work to my client for him to test it.

I showed him all the process on my computer and everything was more than correct (almost perfect).

Then he started to use it on his computer and almost everything crashed.

We realised that his computer is set to deal with long dates. Mine works with short dates. And a big part of this process is based on dates management.

What are the best practises to avoid this kind of situation ?

Dates come from the DatePicker provided by default by Power Apps.

Am I right to use Collections in Power Apps to store those dates (I need to manipulate the same source date for different purposes) ?

The final data are stored in a Sharepoint list (long dates from his computer, short dates from mine).

Thank you for you support !

[WarrenBelz]

Hi @Ben01t ,

Firstly, the underlying date field is SharePoint is simply a Date (not long or short) and can include Time if desired, so that does not matter. When you refer to this date, you can format it - for instance in a Date Picker it has a Format property that you can set to whatever you need. In a Gallery, you can use Text(DataFieldName,"dd/mm/yyyy") or whatever you need. What is different in the client setup as it certainly should not crash - just display the wrong format.

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[Ben01t]

Thank you @WarrenBelz .

The problem is that the dates are stored in Sharepoint with a long format when my client manipulates the App from his pc. And they are in short format when I do the same manipulations on the same App but on my PC.
In further processing (especially splits of dates in short format) some Power Automate flows are in error and emails are not sent.

Is there a way to force the use of short format dates in the 3 environments (Pow App, Pow Aut and Sharepoint)?

Since the very beginning of this App, I had chosen to leave the columns used to store dates in text format because I don't know how to manage dates in ISO or other formats. I just have to manage dates, no dates+hours.
Maybe I need to improve this point.

[WarrenBelz]

Hi @Ben01t ,

Dates in Text - OK I see it now.  I think that is in the "too hard" category, but others may have another opinion. I have never stored them that way, so cannot offer much in the way of suggestions how to manage.

[Ben01t]

I understand. What is the best practise you can show to me ?

[WarrenBelz]

@Ben01t ,

Probably not the answer you want, but save it all as Date field and all this will go away.

[Ben01t]

Rather than modify my current app (and potentially do worse), I created a temporary app to play with the different date formats offered by Power Apps, and the different possibilities to store them in SharePoint (a Text column, a standard Date column, a standard DateTime column).
My client and I get the same good result in SharePoint.
So I wonder if the problem is not with Power Automate.
I am therefore testing the date formatting in Power Automate.
The idea is really to find the origin of the problem and to find the appropriate solution.
If the problem does not come from Power Automate, then I have one last lead: the original SharePoint list is fed by an Excel file that is placed in a SharePoint directory, then the content is copied into this SharePoint list thanks to a Power Automate flow.

[WarrenBelz · Accepted solution]

@Ben01t ,

I cannot see you model, but you might be better converting to a Date in the Flow.