SharePoint 2019 on-prem External Content Type List with DateTime Field as Date ONLY

Question

We do have some SharePoint (on-prem 2019) lists with External Content. The content also also has several date values. By some reason within one SharePoint Site Collection all these fields are displayed as DateTime with Date and Time. We'd like to display the values as date only. Since the List is created from an external content, there is no way to configure the View Fields to fit this requirement, they aren't configurable.
Interesting enough is that Lists from the same External Content created in a different Site Collection do show date only. It might be a default Site Collection default for Date Fields. We are aware of regional settings for site collection or site, but there we only can configure Time Zone and Locale, but not how the date to be displayed.

Any idea where this is to be configured in Site Collection, or any idea if this can be configured with SharePoint Designer? There are some posts which describe this for External Lists https://sharepoint.stackexchange.com/questions/12322/date-only-format-with-bcs , but this doesn't seem to apply for External Content Types. I tried with Format="DateOnly" according to this https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/dev/schema/fieldref-element-contenttype as for FieldRef Element, but either I did it wrong, or it doesn't work.

<FieldRef Name="DueDate" Format="DateOnly"/>

Answer 1

Hi @Anonymous ,

As per my research, I'm afraid there is currently no way to format the Date and Time field of an external list. It is useless to to modify the attribute Format for FieldRef Element (ContentType) as it only specifies a column to reference in this content type, not modifying the attributes of the existing column. In addition, the method described in this article: To customize the date column of an External List has been deprecated in SharePoint Server 2019. I also referred to the answer in this post: SP2013 - External List - How to Remove Time display from a datetime value. Unfortunately, It's useless now in 2021.

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