Date format in DwcA export

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We’re having issues with the date format of what is exported as DwcA to be fed to GBIF and I cannot find the right place to adjust this.

GBIF prefers dates to be in the unambiguous format: YYYY-MM-DD

However, our Specify7 installation exports as: DD/MM/YYYY

Example dataset: NHMD Invertebrate Zoology Collection

As a result, the dataset has about half of its collecting event dates set as being invalid:

Example occurrence is the following:

This has event date delivered as 11/01/1930 which GBIF refuses to parse, because it’s ambiguous.

How can make sure the date format is 1930-01-11 ?

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Hi @fedoras,

The database date format is determined by the Remote Prefs configuration in your database.

To change the database date format, access the app resources function as an admin user by clicking on the user name at the top of the page. Then under the Global Resources there should be a Remote Prefs, find the ui.formatting.scrdateformat property.

ui.formatting.scrdateformat=dd/MM/yyyy

This property controls the database date format and can be set to one of the following values:

MM dd yy
MM dd yyyy
MM-dd-yy
MM-dd-yyyy
MM.dd.yy
MM.dd.yyyy
MM/dd/yy
MM/dd/yyyy
dd MM yy
dd MM yyyy
dd MMM yyyy
dd-MM-yy
dd-MM-yyyy
dd-MMM-yyyy
dd.MM.yy
dd.MM.yyyy
dd.MMM.yyyy
dd/MM/yy
dd/MM/yyyy
dd/MMM/yyy
yyyy MM dd
yyyy-MM-dd
yyyy.MM.dd
yyyy/MM/dd

Therefore, you should be able to set the date format to yyyy-MM-dd to achieve the desired effect. Date pickers within the application will be based on your browser’s locale, but when uploading through the WorkBench you will need to conform to the yyyy-MM-dd format.

I have created a feature request to improve this by allowing the user to choose a formatter for exporting and queries:

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