We got a request from our customer wanting to use a CSV file as Data Source in Telerik Report Designer to generate the report. They were unable to parse DateTime column to DateTime data type in Telerik Report Designer because the CSV returns the column with double quotes for example (“4/14/2021 12:42:25PM”).

Values can be easily cast to DateTime in Telerik Reporting during the datasource definition. The issue here was the quotes that came in the datasource.

In this blog post, we will explore how we can work with this scenario using Expressions provided by Telerik Report Designer..

First, we need to Add Data Source so click on Data in Menu then select the CSV Data Source and select and then click on Next button as below :

check the checkbox if CSV file has headers then click on NEXT button.

Now we the screen appear for Map columns to type and you can see the StartTime column below with double quotes:

Now we try to change the type of StartTime column string to DateTime. Now need to provide Date format in our case like yyyy-mm-dd hh:ss but in our case it will not work and the column will show blank.

Cause of blank again we need the change DateTime to String and Click on NEXT Button and Finish.

Now to the Data Source is connected with the report. the customer want the report with the parameter of data. So we need to convert StartTime(string) to StartTime(DateTime) using expression.

First we need to remove double quotes from StartTime using Replace function.

//Syntax of Replace function
=Replace(text, old substirng, new substring)

In a below code we take a text from Fields.StartTime and provide old substring that to be remove is double quotes in single quotes. and new substring is blank. 

=Replace(Fields.StartTime,'"',"")

We got a StartTime in string without double quotes. so now we need to convert String to DateTime using CDate(value) Funciton. In a CDate function we provide the above Replace function that returning the StartTime without double qoutes.

= CDate(Replace(Fields.StartTime,'"',""))

Now we got the StartTime with the type of DateTime. and the above Expression we can use any where we want like filter the data and making parameter range with StartTime.