OBIEE - Controlling the Date format

Different countries use different date formats. Most of them are logical. The Default in OBIEE is the American way. Lets see how can we change it.

My customer wanted the the date in European format and stay with English interface.

 

Option 1:

 The default option is to change the settings for each user in My Account:

And set the locale to a proper one. 

For example this is English United States:

This is English UK:

This is Russian dates:

When you change to non English locale, and want the user Interface in English, remember to change that back, since it changes automatically (in this example to Russian).

 

Option 2:

When I don't want to bother with My Account, I can try brute force by changing localedefinitions.xml (located at MWHOME/Oracle_BI1/bifoundation/web/display).

Find there:

 <localeDefinition name="en">              <!-- english base -->

and there change:

<property name="dateShortFormat">M/d/yyyy</property>
 <property name="dateLongFormat">dddd, MMMM dd, yyyy</property>

to

<property name="dateShortFormat">dd/MM/yyyy</property>
 <property name="dateLongFormat">dddd, dd MMMM, yyyy</property>

Just remember it might be restored to default after patches.