Formatting a date using the Expression Editor

[lthurman]

Hello Qlik Sense Community,

I need to convert a date variable from this format 201701 to Jan 2017. I tried using Date and Date#, but instead of getting the short month and year, I only get the year. Our variable name is BillingDate and I use it like this:

Date(Date#(BillingDate, 'YYYYMM'), 'MMM YYYY')

I've also tried using MM as part of the output format, but I still only get the year. Any ideas as to where I may be going wrong?

Thanks

[sunny_talwar]

Are you sure BillingDate is formatted YYYYMM from the script? May be this is a front end format and the back end format is something else?

[diegofcaivano]

Hi Lorenzo,

Make sure you have these system variables correctly defined in your script.

SET LongMonthNames='Enero;Febrero;Marzo;Abril;Mayo;Junio;Julio;Agosto;Septiembre;Octubre;Noviembre;Diciembre';
SET MonthNames='Ene;Feb;Mar;Abr;May;Jun;Jul;Ago;Sep;Oct;Nov;Dic';

Regards.

[lthurman]

I believe the format is the same. I'm actually loading the data from a QVD and if I just use BillingDate without any formatting, I get 201701, for example.

[lthurman]

I did not have MonthNames defined in my script. I added them, but I still get the same result.

[diegofcaivano]

OK. Try to confirm that the original value is really a number by applying Num#() function to interprete it as such, and then checking its data-type in the model tables viewer or any other way.

[lthurman]

I’ve looked at the Data Model Viewer and the data is formatted as stated above. I also tried using num# and the results are the same, year, no short month.

=Date(Date#(Num#(BillingPeriodVal), 'YYYYMM'), 'MMM YYYY')

[sunny_talwar]

What do you get when you load the data like this

Num(BillingDate) as Num,

Text(BillingDate) as Text

[lthurman]

Can I do this in the load script that loads QVD’s? If so, how?

[sunny_talwar]

You can, just need to load like this

LOAD *,

     Num(BillingDate) as Num,

     Text(BillingDate) as Text

FROM NameOfTheQVD.qvd (qvd);