IDS documents have elements that contain date values. These elements contain attributes that describe the formatting used in the field. For example:
<DateOfBirth format="yyyy-MM-dd">1965-02-21</DateOfBirth>
The value of the format element must be a valid Java 1.6 java.text.SimpleDateFormatter format string. For more information, see the following API documentation:
http://docs.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/text/SimpleDateFormat.html