Date

To accept and display a date to a user, requires it to be consistent and must not cause confusion where a user may misunderstand the month for a day.

It is therefore required that when a user enters a date, or while displaying a date to a user, the pattern must always be ` day month year`


Displaying a date

The official pattern for the United Arab Emirates is DMY. You may still want to display the date in variations, however it must be in the same order.

To display the date as numeric values only

28/09/2023

To display the date with characters in more human-friendly readable format.

28th Sep, 2023

Should we provide country specific formats?

Country specefic date formats are listed on Wikipedia:Date format by country.

At this moment, the design system does not recommend the need to have country specefic date formats added while displaying a date to a user. The design system will follow the standard date format display method of the United Arab Emirates only.


The ISO 8601 standard

When you need to print a date which is not specefically displayed to a user that is consuming content - and you need to output the date format to comply with other tools, such as log viewers, you must follow the ISO 8601 standard which is ` YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm:ss TZ`

  • Display this date format for log files
  • Display this date format to show proof of an action, such as at the footer of a printed page to show when a document was printed.
  • Display this date format in technical documents that may be used by OCR scanners.