Responsive Date Format

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Mark A Johnson
Propeller Head
Posts: 12
Joined: Mon Jan 21, 2013 9:49 am

Responsive Date Format

Post by Mark A Johnson »

I have a release notes project that includes release notes for many different products. We are going to add the date of the release to each release note entry. The audience includes users from the U.S. and Europe. The writing team needs to decide on the format of the date.

Question: Is there any way to include a date that can respond to the browser's location? For example, we would like to change "Dec 18, 2019" to "18 Dec, 2019" when viewed in Europe.

Any advice greatly appreciated.

Mark
bunnycat
Propeller Head
Posts: 70
Joined: Tue Nov 03, 2015 6:44 am

Re: Responsive Date Format

Post by bunnycat »

For each target, you could define a DateTimeVariable in its variable sets.
Unfortunately, it's not going to be actually responsive to the country, but you could use the DateTimeVariable in each output to give that target its own specific date and time formatting.

I use the DateTimeVariable all over the place in my different outputs - I use it as "topic was last updated on <date>" for TopNav help topics, and on front covers of PDFs, for when they were built last. Is very handy :)

EDIT - oops, you wanted browser response to the Date time format. Maybe if you create different outputs for US vs Europe, you could use the DateVariable, and then conditionalize its use somehow?!? Not entirely sure if you can do that sort of detection out of the box with Flare or if it would need some custom javascript. I'm guessing... sorry.

MadCap Flare help https://help.madcapsoftware.com/flare20 ... iables.htm? - had a note about Date Time variables and operating systems in different languages and their targets, (English vs French was the example) but not necessarily just browsers.

"System variables use the language set in a tag, in the target, or at the project level. For example, you might have an English operating system, but in a Flare target you have French set as the language. If you insert a date/time variable, the day and month will display in French when you generate that target. Flare will also adjust the format of the variable if necessary (e.g., date first vs. month first)."

Hope this helps a little

-CAT
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