Export > Custom tabular exporter: date formatting doesn't work

[allanaaa]

Using the custom tabular exporter to export dates into locale formats (short, medium, long, full) doesn't seem to have any effect in any of the available output formats.

To Reproduce

Export some columns of identical dates into the five available locale formats.

Current Results

HTML tables, XLS, XLSX, CSV, and TSV all output the original data into each cell, no matter which locale format you've chosen. Omitting time does nothing. The "use local time zone" checkbox does nothing.

Short,Medium,Long,Full,ISO
2020-09-16T13:15:31Z,2020-09-16T13:15:31Z,2020-09-16T13:15:31Z,2020-09-16T13:15:31Z,2020-09-16T13:15:31Z
2020-09-15T13:15:00Z,2020-09-15T13:15:00Z,2020-09-15T13:15:00Z,2020-09-15T13:15:00Z,2020-09-15T13:15:00Z

Expected Behavior

Presumably (like some of the other settings for the custom tabular exporter) this is intended to work in at least one of the available output formats, but maybe not all of them. Can anyone tell me which formats?

There seem to be other discussions (#3322 for example) around this right now so I just want to register this as something to test when those are worked on.

[rachittiwari8562]

I have looked into this issue,and there seems to have some problem in backened.
As far as i have researched the parameters are correcty passed in the backened upto the file main/src/com/google/refine/exporters/CustomizableTabularExporterUtilities.java
But in the function "void setup()" the "date" variable (which ideally should have user selected values for different options) has default values and hence it gives identical results.

[rachittiwari8562]

Also i am having a hunch that something is wrong in the else case in the line from 117 to 136 .Specifically in the line 129.

[allanaaa]

This issue is being noted in the 3.4.1 documentation here: https://deploy-preview-3336--openrefine-docs.netlify.app/manual/exporting/#custom-tabular-exporter
(soon to be at https://docs.openrefine.org/manual/exporting#custom-tabular-exporter )

In the future, when a PR to fix this has been completed, the documentation should be updated to reflect the functions.

[wetneb]

We also noted that at the moment the option to ignore the time is not honoured.

[tfmorris]

Can anyone tell me which formats?

XLS, XLSX, & ODS probably won't support localized dates. The rest of the listed formats probably should, although we might want to make ISO 8601 the default for CSV/TSV to encourage people to not make life more difficult for themselves.

[xbdeng]

I want to try to solve this issue, and I have done something. Could you assign this issue to me?