DateTime to javascript date

Question

From another answer on Stackoverflow is a conversion from Javascript date to .net DateTime:

long msSinceEpoch = 1260402952906; // Value from Date.getTime() i         


        

Answer 1

I know this is a little late, but here's the solution I had to come up with for handling dates when you want to be timezone independent. Essentially it involves converting everything to UTC.

From Javascript to Server:

Send out dates as epoch values with the timezone offset removed.

var d = new Date(2015,0,1) // Jan 1, 2015
// Ajax Request to server ...
$.ajax({
  url: '/target',
  params: { date: d.getTime() - (d.getTimezoneOffset() * 60 * 1000) }
});

The server then recieves 1420070400000 as the date epoch.

On the Server side, convert that epoch value to a datetime object:

DateTime d = new DateTime(1970, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0).AddMilliseconds(epoch);

At this point the date is just the date/time provided by the user as they provided it. Effectively it is UTC.

Going the other way:

When the server pulls data from the database, presumably in UTC, get the difference as an epoch (making sure that both date objects are either local or UTC):

long ms = (long)utcDate.Subtract(new DateTime(1970, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, DateTimeKind.Utc)).TotalMilliseconds;

or

long ms = (long)localDate.Subtract(new DateTime(1970, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, DateTimeKind.Local)).TotalMilliseconds;

When javascript receives this value, create a new date object. However, this date object is going to be assumed local time, so you need to offset it by the current timezone:

var epochValue = 1420070400000 // value pulled from server.
var utcDateVal = new Date(epochValue);
var actualDate = new Date(utcDateVal.getTime() + (utcDateVal.getTimezoneOffset() * 60 * 1000))

console.log(utcDateVal); // Wed Dec 31 2014 19:00:00 GMT-0500 (Eastern Standard Time)
console.log(actualDate); // Thu Jan 01 2015 00:00:00 GMT-0500 (Eastern Standard Time)

As far as I know, this should work for any time zone where you need to display dates that are timezone independent.