Concatenate, STRVAL, and COALESCE re-format dates (1 Comment)

Issue report by durniak

Product

FileMaker Pro

Version

12, 13

Operating system version

All

Description of the issue

It appears these functions change the date format, which is not expected:

1. John Renfrew discovered that if you concatenate the date with "nothing", that if becomes the standard date format that we use (MM/DD/YYYY or DD/MM/YYYY or our non-Am cousins):

SELECT ''||dateCreated // note that's TWO single quotes before the two pipe characters

2. STRVAL() will convert to "text":

SELECT STRVAL(dateCreated) // again depending on where you are located in the world you get MM/DD/YYYY or DD/MM/YYYY

3. COALESCE() is a function that does several things. For dates:

SELECT COALESCE(dateCreated,'') // note the TWO single quotes after the comma

See: https://fmdev.filemaker.com/message/150100#150100

Steps to reproduce the problem

run a query

Expected result

date format should not change

Actual result

dates are re-formatted

Exact text of any error message(s) that appear

none

Workaround

use other functions