Is it possible to define the date format of Excel fields?

[gadeyne.bram]

Hi,

I'm trying to import an excel file. Everything works fine but the date fields are in format dd/MM/yyyy and can only be read as string. I've tried setting the format property in teiiddesigner  and setting the data type to date but then I get an exception "Expected format = yyyy-mm-dd for 01/07/1964"

Should this be possible? Do I need to set something else?

[shawkins]

> Should this be possible?

The format property in Designer has historically not been used.  It's original intent may have been for situations like this, but I'm not sure.

> Do I need to set something else?

The simplest thing is to add a view layer with the appropriate parseTimestamp.  However that may perform the way you want as we can't generally invert "parseTimestamp(col, format) = timestamp literal" into "col = string literal" due to the laxness of the parsing logic in parseTimestamp. 

So enhancements could be to support the format property in excel - or more generally add an argument to parseTimestamp such that it preforms only strict parsing such that it can be inverted.