SXA date variant and language fallback

Sitecore SXA DateVariantField

Note: this post assumes you know what a SXA variant is - if not, please read the documentation first.

Within a SXA variant, you can use a DateVariantField "Date" to display date and time from a date field in a chosen format. This definition is similar to the Field variant, but has an additional field "Date format" that allows you to choose a date and time format.

The date formats are stored in /sitecore/system/Settings/Foundation/Experience Accelerator/Rendering Variants/Enums/Date Formats as items (with display names).

On https://sitecore.stackexchange.com/a/8489/237 Alan explains how this works together with cultures and such. In short: SXA will render the date in the current culture with the given format.

We have a project with a few languages and language fallback is enabled with English as fallback for all other languages. Our date variants worked perfectly in Sitecore 9.0.2 with SXA 1.7.1 but after our upgrade to Sitecore 9.2 and SXA 1.9 we saw something weird...

Date variants and language fallback

So we have a site with language fallback enabled and it seems to work fine. But then we noticed weird date formats in our date variants when switching languages - although we had the format set to dd/MM/yyyy we did see a time value:

In English everything was still ok.

The workaround

First thing to check is language fallback is actually enabled on the site.

Note that since SXA 1.9 there is a checkbox to enable item language fallback. As this is an upgraded site, we also still have the fallback setting in the Other properties field, just to be very sure...

The workaround for the issue that I solved it for me was:

1. Create language versions for /sitecore/system/Settings/Foundation/Experience Accelerator/Rendering Variants/Enums/Date Formats/date2 (which is the dd/MM/yyyy item) and give them a display name just like the English version. Repeat for every format you want to use.
2. Remove the standard value from the variants format field. Save. Then select the dd/MM/yyyy again (this time actually selected and not as standard value). 
3. Create language versions for the variant item.

Not all steps might be needed - Support and myself had some different conclusions on that.. and I think caching was also involved. Step 2 however is certainly needed - with a standard value it won't work (bug listed with reference number 119290)

But with this workaround all was fine again.