Question

I have a DB table with relation 1: N where N represents multiple dates for one event. The column with the dates is DateTime type, and I would like to keep the Time option for later use, but it won’t be so bad if I have to change it to Date type.

The problem comes when I have to show those multiple dates in some GUI. I get the dates with the GROUP_CONCAT function which means that in JavaScript I operate with a string with comma-separated values representing the different dates, which by now is in the default SQL DateTime format – YYYY-mm-dd hh:mm:ss.

I use the split(',') function to get each date-time value and what I can do is to change the type of the SQL column to Date so when I split the string in JavaScript to end up with YYYY-mm-dd values. Which should be reversed to dd-mm-YYYY for the GUI.

I’m not sure how to proceed here. I have in mind two main options:

First: Maybe there’s a way to use dd-mm-YYYY format in SQL which will solve all the problems.

Second: some kind of (complex?!?) String manipulation in JavaScript to split the string of dates into an array with multiple elements and then try to format each element the way I need.

Honestly – I want to avoid the second option, but don’t know if the first is possible, and maybe, there’s another way that I haven’t think of.

Answer 1

Try this..

SELECT GROUP_CONCAT(DATE_FORMAT( date_time_column, '%d-%m-%Y' )) FROM test_table;