Kendo DatePicker fails validation for custom date format
I'm using Kendo DatePicker to edit a Date field being displayed in a Kendo Grid in my ASP.NET MVC 4 project. In order to have the DatePicker being used for the Date field use custom date format string, I updated the Date.cshtml file under the EditorTemplates folder to the following:
@(Html.Kendo().DatePickerFor(m => m).Format("dd/MM/yyyy"))
By doing that, I managed to have the DatePicker display the format as I want it to. However, it failed validation for some of the dates entered for input, either via manual key in or selection from the popup calendar.
Upon further investigation, I can say that the DatePicker is validating the date based on a M/d/Y format. That assumption was made based on my foundings that 12/1/2012 is a valid date, whereas 13/1/2012 is not.
I also tried adding .ParseFormat("dd/MM/yyyy") to the end of the DatePicker declaration in Date.cshtml but it does not fix anything. So I would say that this is definitely a bug and I will report this to Telerik later.
But for the time being, I'm looking for a workaround to have this working. I find that I can override kendo.ui.validator.rules.mvcdate in Javascript to have my own validation function. While this work fine in Chrome, it does not work in IE9.
So, any ideas how I can make the DatePicker to accept dd/MM/yyyy input format? Thanks in advance.
Answer
Internally, the date validation rule for ASP.NET MVC (the unobtrusive client validation), uses kendo.parseDate(string) method, which internally will use the predefined date patterns if no format/s is/are defined. I suppose that in your case the default culture is "en-US" and that is why validation fails, because dates with "dd/MM/yyyy" format are considered as not valid. One possible solution is to override the date validation rule (as you did) and parse the string using a specific format. The other option is to set diff culture settings for the page. For instance, the short date format for the "de-DE" culture is "dd/MM/yyyy".