String convert to Date Format

[jo_bonanno]

I have a date field $F{postdate} in String "yyyymmdd". Is there any way when I have read from my db instead of showing straight "yyyymmdd" it display as "mm/dd/yyyy".

[kevintaute]

I have a couple of questions -

 

Is $F{postdate} stored in the database as a date value or as a string?

 

If it is stored as a date, you can use the text field screen the pattern box to format as mm/dd/yyyy. Most of the formats that are brought up with the create button are dd/MM/yyyy - after selecting the format, I change it to MM/dd/yyyy without any issues :)

 

If it is stored as a string you can either use a Java expression to convert to date then display or use Java substring parsing to do the same.

[tlavalle]

That doesn't work. I made a variable and converted my field to string, then proceeded to set the pattern on the properties window and the column looks like this MM/dd/yy 2006/01/01

 

the variable I have in the expression $f{<fieldname>}.toString()