Quickly Formatting the date in an ASP.NET Gridview

Console.WriteLine("Woop!");

I have recently been dealing with GridViews quite a bit, and one of the things that annoyed me was the way you had to format a date.

You are normally forced to create a function in your code-behind page, and pass the date to it - Which is annoying if you only ever need to format a single date on the page. Something like the following:

Page.aspx

<asp:TemplateField HeaderText="Date Header Here">

   <ItemTemplate>

      <%#FormatDate(Eval("SQLDateValue"))%>

   </ItemTemplate>
</asp:TemplateField>

Page.aspx.cs

public object FormatDate(object input)

{

   string stringObject = input.ToString();

   DateTime dttm = DateTime.Parse(stringObject);

   return dttm.ToString("dd-MMM-yyyy");

}

This was rather annoying, as it seemed like a very roundabout way to do something seemingly small. After messing around a bit, I found a nice compact way to do it in the GridView itself!

<asp:TemplateField HeaderText="Date Header Here">

   <ItemTemplate>

      <%#DateTime.Parse(Eval("DateReceived").ToString()).ToString("dd-MMM-yyyy")%>

   </ItemTemplate>

</asp:TemplateField>

Win! \o/

On an unrelated note, getting decently formatted ASP.NET / C# code in blogspot is a nightmare >_>