Material fields & dates

A Material can carry two things that shape every Certificate produced from it: fields that add standard information to your documents, and a date format that normalises the varied date styles that arrive from your sources into one consistent output.

Before you start

• You need the Materials update permission to change fields and date options — see Roles & permissions.
• Open the Material record you want to configure — see Materials overview.

Material fields

Material fields define the standard information that should appear on every document for this Material — for example a customer number or lot number.

1. Open the Material and go to the Material fields section.
2. Select Add Field.
3. Enter a Field Name, an optional Description, and an optional Value.
4. Select Add Field to save it.

Your fields appear in a table of Field Name, Description and Value. Use the row actions to edit or remove a field, and drag the handle to reorder.

Tip

A field’s Value acts as the default that appears on every certificate for the Material, so you can pin information that’s the same across all its documents.

Date-format standardisation

Documents arrive from many sources — CSV, Excel, PDF and XML — and their dates rarely agree: 01/02/2026, 2026-02-01 and 1 Feb 2026 can all mean the same day. DASH can convert every mapped date to a single output format so your generated XML and PDF are consistent, whatever came in.

You set the format on the Material, in the Output Date & Time Format options (available in the creation wizard and on the Material record):

1. Choose a Date format. Leave it on No conversion — keep original ingested dates to pass dates through unchanged, or pick a preset, or Custom… to enter your own pattern.
2. Tick Source dates are day-first if your incoming dates put the day before the month — so 03/04 is read as 3 April, not 4 March.

The Output Date & Time Format options on a Material

Once set, every mapped date value is converted to this format when a Certificate’s output is generated — for all source formats. The conversion is safe: if a value can’t be interpreted as a date, it’s passed through unchanged rather than being lost.

Tip

When you review a certificate, the preview shows the converted dates exactly as they’ll appear on the final document, so what you see in review is what gets generated. See Review & edit mapped data.

Fixing a date that isn’t converting

Sometimes a date sits in a text field and isn’t recognised as a date, so it isn’t converted. During certificate review, DASH can flag such a value and offer a Make comply action to treat that property as a date going forward — see Review & edit mapped data.

Related

• Materials overview
• Create a Material with the wizard
• Edit & delete a Material
• Review & edit mapped data
• Organisation metadata fields