Handling and storing elapsed time

Question

I'm having problems deciding on what is the best way is to handle and store time measurements.

I have an app that has a textbox that allows the users to input time in either hh:mm:ss or mm:ss format.

So I was planning on parsing this string, tokenizing it on the colons and creating TimeSpan (or using TimeSpan.Parse() and just adding a "00:" to the mm:ss case) for my business logic. Ok?

How do I store this as in a database though? What would the field type be? DateTime seems wrong. I don't want a time of 00:54:12 to be stored as 1901-01-01 00:54:12 that seems a bit poor?

Answer 1

TimeSpan has an Int64 Ticks property that you can store instead, and a constructor that takes a Ticks value.

Answer 2

I think the simplest is to just convert user input into a integer number of seconds. So 54:12 == 3252 seconds, so store the 3252 in your database or wherever. Then when you need to display it to the user, you can convert it back again.

Answer 3

For periods less than a day, just use seconds as other have said.

For longer periods, it depends on your db engine. If SQL Server, prior to version 2008 you want a datetime. It's okay- you can just ignore the default 1/1/1900 date they'll all have. If you are fortunate enough to have sql server 2008, then there are separate Date and Time datatypes you can use. The advantage with using a real datetime/time type is the use of the DateDiff function for comparing durations.