Dynamics 365 Business Central: How to quickly get the day of the week from a date (Date virtual table)

Hi, Readers.
Today I would like to talk about how to quickly get the day of the week from a date in Business Central.
As you might know, the standard way to get the day of the week from a date in Business Central is to use the System.Date2DWY Method.

System.Date2DWY Method: Gets the day of the week, week number, or year of a Date Data Type.

But as shown above, this method is actually not returning the day of the week, just a number in the week (1=Monday, 2=Tuesday, 3=Wednesday, etc).

For example:

Thursday=4

So, is there a way to directly return the day of the week? Not a number?

Yes, this time we need to use the Date virtual table.

The Date virtual table (ID 2000000007) in Business Central gives you easy access to days, weeks, months, quarters, and years.
The Date virtual table has the following fields.

And the primary key is “Period Type”, “Period Start”.

You can force Business Central to run the “Date” table by adding the ?table=2000000007 parameter to the URL, such as in the following example: 
https://businesscentral.dynamics.com/d8f36038-1f93-4543-affc-5dc92b6ee871/Sandbox?table=2000000007

The dates from 01/03/0001 to 12/31/9999 will be displayed by different period types.

Let’s see some details.

If Period Type is Date

Period No.: The day of the week (1=Monday, 2=Tuesday, 3=Wednesday, etc)
Period Name: Name of the date (Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, etc)

If Period Type is Week

Period No.: Week Number of the year
Period Name: Week Number of the year

If Period Type is Month

Period No.: Month Number (1=Jaunary, 2=Frbruary, 3=March, etc)
Period Name: Name of the month

If Period Type is Quarter

Period No.: Quarter Number (1=Jaunary~March, 2=April~June, 3= July~September, etc)
Period Name: Quarter Number (1=Jaunary~March, 2=April~June, 3= July~September, etc)

If Period Type is Year

Period No.: Year
Period Name: Year

Okay, I believe that you should already know how to use it.
let’s try again.

PS: The day of the week got in this way will be automatically translated.

Test Video:

Source Code:

pageextension 50112 ZYCustomerListExt extends "Customer List"
{
    trigger OnOpenPage()
    var
        Msg: Label 'Today is %1.\And today is %2.';
        DateForWeek: Record Date;
    begin
        if DateForWeek.Get(DateForWeek."Period Type"::Date, Today) then
            Message(Msg, Today, DateForWeek."Period Name");
    end;
}

PS:
There is another easy way, using System.Format Method.

For example:

The result:

Source Code:

pageextension 50112 ZYCustomerListExt extends "Customer List"
{
    trigger OnOpenPage()
    var
        Msg: Label 'Today is %1.\And today is %2.';
    begin
        Message(Msg, Today, Format(Today, 0, '<Weekday Text>'));
    end;
}

You can find more about Formatting Values, Dates, and Time from Microsoft Docs.

END

Hope this will help.

Thanks for reading.

ZHU