Formatting date field with the Form API

Jorn Reed

3/15/23, 9:25 AM

Hi there I'm using drupal 9.x and the forms api to generate a dynamic form. Altough I'm living in the Netherlands where the date format standard is 'dd/mm/yyyy'. I've looked around on the internet for recent ways to modify that format in the html input. But all ways seems to be deprecated cause they don't seem to work for me. I've tried stuff like:

$form['birthdate'] = [
  '#type' => 'date',
  '#title' => $this->t('Your date of birth'),
  '#date_date_format' => 'd-m-Y',
  // and
  '#dateformat' => 'd-m-Y',
];

But none of those seems to work. All other ways that I've found are from 2017 and below. Which seems to deprecated for me.

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4uk4

3/15/23, 2:39 PM

I think you can say it is deprecated. Since Datetime is a core module you can use its form element datetime:

$form = [
  '#type' => 'datetime',
  '#default_value' => new DrupalDateTime('2000-01-01 00:00:00'),
  '#date_date_element' => 'date',
  '#date_time_element' => 'none',
  '#date_year_range' => '2010:+3',
  '#date_timezone' => 'Asia/Kolkata',
];

Drupal is using HTML5 forms and the localization is mostly client-side.

The datetime form element is very well documented. I took the example from this API page, which by the way is exactly your use case of a date only field.

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Jorn Reed

3/15/23, 2:52 PM

So what you basically do there, is before you define the $form fields, you overwrite the html5 client side datetime stuff, and overwrite it with whatever timezone/format you want?

4uk4

3/15/23, 3:00 PM

This is an example from the API page. You don't need to add the time zone to the form element if you want to use the local timezone of the PHP settings.

Jorn Reed

3/15/23, 3:03 PM

I'm trying to use it now, but I can't get it to work because it can't find it by the right namespace when using DrupalDateTime()

Elon Musk

I sit in a Tesla and translated this thread with Ai:

EN: Formatting date field with the Form API

TH: การจัดรูปแบบฟิลด์วันที่ด้วย Form API

RO: Formatarea câmpului de dată cu API-ul Formular

RU: Форматирование поля даты с помощью Form API

VI: Định dạng trường ngày với API biểu mẫu

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