In some situations, you might like to change the way Looker formats dates.

For example, if you're building Explores and dashboards for users in Europe, any dates in all-numeric format should appear in the order Day-Month-Year. June 7th, 2019 should be formatted as 07/06/2019 (or Jun 07, 2019), but Looker's default format would render it as 2019-06-07. Of course, making such a change is possible using SQL functions like DATE_FORMAT(), but you might not want to write everything in plain SQL.

Liquid to the Rescue

We need only apply some Liquid formatting on the html parameter of a dimension to easily change the date format. Since Liquid is expecting a valid date, it is best to use the timeframes from an original dimension group.

For example: ${created_date}, ${created_week}, and so on:

dimension: date_formatted {
 sql: ${created_date} ;;
 html: {{ rendered_value | date: "%b %d, %y" }} ;;
}

The formatting string "%b %d, %y" is in the syntax of strftime.

Because we are using Liquid formatting on the html parameter, we are not changing the original value, only the way it is rendered to the user. This ensures that the ordering does not change.

Below are some other examples you can use. The full list of available formats is further down.

Customizing Date Formats Even Further

With these Liquid formats, we can pretty much change the format of anything, as long as it's a valid date format. (We can't change the week or month numbers, because those are returned as integers.) In the example below, we are formatting day, week, and month differently, and we add the created group_label to simulate a date dimension group.

Result

LookML

# My original dimension group
dimension_group: created {
 hidden: yes
 type: time
 timeframes: [date,week,month]
 sql: ${TABLE}.created_at ;;
}

# My customized timeframes, added under the group "Created"
dimension: date_formatted {
 group_label: "Created" label: "Date"
 sql: ${created_date} ;;
 html: {{ rendered_value | date: "%b %d, %y" }};;
}

dimension: week_formatted {
 group_label: "Created" label: "Week"
 sql: ${created_week} ;;
 html: {{ rendered_value | date: "Week %U (%b %d)" }};;
}

dimension: month_formatted {
 group_label: "Created" label: "Month"
 sql: ${created_month} ;;
 html: {{ rendered_value | append: "-01" | date: "%B %Y" }};;
}

strftime Reference