Question

I have a date field that I populate a dropdownlist with. The date field is like this 2012-05-01 00:00:00 and I need the dropdown list to look like this 5/2012. But to put a wrench in things, I need to pull the date apart before I put it back together again.

Specifically, I need to find all “distinct” months and all “distinct” years, but I only want to find the distinct year, if there is a datefield with a month for that year and vice-versa.

So I have the following data

Table: budget

id   Item   ItemDate
1     A     5/12/2012
2     B     5/14/2012
3     C     4/5/2012
4     D     4/7/2012
5     E     7/15/2011

So I want my dropdown list to show the following only:

5/2012
4/2012
7/2011

I have tried using

SELECT DISTINCT datepart(Month, ItemDate) + ' ' + datepart(year, ItemDate) As ddlList 
FROM Budget

but that adds the month to the year (5 + 2012 = 2017).

and then my asp

<asp:dropdownlist id="ddl1" runat="server" datasourceID="sqldatasrc" DataTextField="ddlList"></dropdownlist>

Any ideas? I’m not sure I’m going about this the right way.

Answer 1

ASP.NET

If I remember correctly, I believe you can use the property DataTextFormatString available on the DropDownList control to format the boundfield values. You have to set the property to the value {0:M/yyyy}. Please make sure that the property is available. I couldn’t find it in MSDN.

I could find only ListControl.DataTextFormatString Property

SQL

You have to cast the MONTH and YEAR parts of the datetime field values to VARCHAR or string data type before concatenating those values.

Demo

Click here to view the demo in SQL Fiddle.

Script:

SELECT  
DISTINCT    CAST(DATEPART(MONTH, ItemDate) AS VARCHAR) + '/' + 
            CAST(DATEPART(YEAR, ItemDate) AS VARCHAR) AS ddlList 
FROM        dbo.Budget

Alternative way to write the same script:

SELECT  
DISTINCT    CAST(MONTH(ItemDate) AS VARCHAR) + '/' + 
            CAST(YEAR(ItemDate) AS VARCHAR) AS ddlList 
FROM        dbo.Budget;

Create and insert script:

CREATE TABLE dbo.Budget
(
     Id         INT         NOT NULL 
  ,  Item       VARCHAR(10) NOT NULL
  ,  ItemDate   DATETIME    NOT NULL
)

INSERT INTO dbo.Budget (Id, Item, ItemDate) VALUES
 (1, 'A', '05/12/2012'),
 (2, 'B', '05/14/2012'),
 (3, 'C', '04/05/2012'),
 (4, 'D', '04/07/2012'),
 (5, 'E', '07/15/2012');

Output:

DDLLIST
-------
4/2012
5/2012
7/2012