Chris,

Often the style gets ignored or overridden by the character string being in a different state. It also keeps the time element which seems to me slighty at odds compared to convert this datetime to a date string.

I will try and encourage develoeprs to use a datetime type rather than passing a string and hoping that the database will alter it to something correct. XML has a proper datetime type as well.

And yes I have had my fingers burnt by the odd load coming in with some dates being in one format and another being in a different format, in the same file.