Until now, the customers of our low-code platform were only European, but things will change soon and we have to deal with many non-european date formats.

As you can see on this map, the European format (dd/mm/yyyy, for example 31/12/2018) is the most widespread around the globe, but Asian countries mainly use the alternative yyyy/mm/dd format (for example, 2018/12/31). This one is definitely the best option for sorting.

The United States, on the other hand, uses a format that is specific to them, mm/dd/yyyy (for example 12/31/2018).

Similarly, some countries use 2-digit dates (eg 01/08/2018), while others prefer to delete zeros, for example 1/8/2018.

Finally, to make things more fun, there are also different types of separators: the slash /, the point. and the hyphen …

All this combined gives us a number of possible combinations, and we now offer all of them in PickaForm applications!

Initially, we wanted to offer the correct date format depending on the user’s country detected by the web browser, but in reality, there are many use cases where it works poorly.

On top of this, some users prefer to use other formats (in my case, I’m French but I prefer to use the yyyy/mm/dd format, which seems more logical to me).

In the end, we prefered to leave the choice to the user, in a menu located just under the choice of language, like shown below.

We hope this new opportunity will allow our non-european users to feel home with PickaForm!