JSON Date and DateTime serialisation in c# & newtonsoft

As I mentioned in a comment, there is no standard date representation in JSON. The ISO8601 is the de-facto standard, ie most people started using this some years ago. ISO8601 does not require milliseconds. If the other endpoint requires them, it’s violating the defacto standard.

Json.NET has been using IOS8601 since version 4.5. The current one is 10.0.3. The following code :

JsonConvert.SerializeObject(DateTime.Now)

returns

"2017-09-08T19:01:55.714942+03:00"

On my machine. Notice the timezone offset. That’s also part of the standard. Z means UTC.

You can specify your own time format, provided it’s the correct one. In this case, it should be yyyy-MM-ddTHH:mm:ss.fffZ. Notice the fff for milliseconds and HH for 24-hour.

The following code

var settings=new JsonSerializerSettings{DateFormatString ="yyyy-MM-ddTHH:mm:ss.fffZ"};
var json=JsonConvert.SerializeObject(DateTime.Now,settings);

returns

"2017-09-08T19:04:14.480Z"

The format string does not force a timezone translation. You can tell Json.NET to treat the time as Local or Utc through the DateTimeZoneHandling setting :

var settings=new JsonSerializerSettings{
                              DateFormatString ="yyyy-MM-ddTH:mm:ss.fffZ",
                              DateTimeZoneHandling=DateTimeZoneHandling.Utc};
var json=JsonConvert.SerializeObject(DateTime.Now,settings);

Returns :

"2017-09-08T16:08:19.290Z"

UPDATE

As Matt Johnson explains, Z is just a literal, while K generates either Z or an offset, depending on the DateTimeZoneHandling setting.

The format string yyyy-MM-ddTH:mm:ss.fffK with DateTimeZoneHandling.Utc :

var settings=new JsonSerializerSettings{
                              DateFormatString ="yyyy-MM-ddTH:mm:ss.fffK",
                              DateTimeZoneHandling=DateTimeZoneHandling.Utc};
var json=JsonConvert.SerializeObject(DateTime.Now,settings);

Will return :

2017-09-11T9:10:08.293Z

Changing to DateTimeZoneHandling.Utc will return

2017-09-11T12:15:12.862+03:00

Which, by the way is the default behaviour of Json.NET, apart from the forced millisecond precision.

Finally, .NET doesn’t have a Date-only type yet. DateTime is used for both dates and date+time values. You can get the date part of a DateTime with the DateTime.Date property. You can retrieve the current date with DateTime.Today.

Time of day is represented by the Timespan type. You can extract the time of day from a DateTime value with DateTime.TimeOfDay. Timespan isn’t strictly a time-of-day type as it can represent more than 24 hours.

What was that yet?

Support for explicit Date, TimeOfDay is comming through the CoreFX Lab project. This contains “experimental” features that are extremely likely to appear in the .NET Runtime like UTF8 support, Date, String, Channles. Some of these already appear as separate NuGet packages.

One can use the System.Time classes already, either by copying the code or adding them through the experimental NuGet source

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