DataWindow expressions
Adding a DataWindow expression opens the Modify Expression
dialog box. This enables you to create references to columns from the
data source of the DataWindow object. One use of this feature is to
return a fragment of XML to embed, providing another level of dynamic
XML generation.
Using Date and DateTime with
strings
If you use a control reference or a DataWindow expression that
does not include a string to represent Date and DateTime columns in a
template, the XML output conforms to ISO 8601 date and time formats.
For example, consider a date that displays as 12/27/2016 in the
DataWindow object, using the display format mm/dd/yyyy. If the export
template does not use an expression that includes a string, the date
is exported to XML as 2016-12-27.
However, if the export template uses an expression that combines
a column with a Date or DateTime datatype with a string, the entire
expression is exported as a string and the regional settings in the
Windows registry are used to format the date and time.
Using the previous example, if the short date format in the
registry is MM/dd/yy, and the DataWindow expression is: “Start Date is
” + start_date, the XML output is Start Date is 12/27/16.