Kendo MVC Datepicker timezone translation

Question

We are observing the following issue related to the time differences between our MVC app and a Kendo DatePicker. The web server is running in UTC+0. The web clients are running in different time zones (UTC+1, UTC+3, UTC-5, etc.)

The web page contains a Kendo date picker (no time portion) where user selects a single day or a month. Behind the scenes The date is sent in an AJAX request using full Date objects which contain the time and timezone information.

We are only interested in the date portion irrespective of the time zone that client is in. When a user selects a date/month we want to receive a C# DateTime object in the local server time.

For example:

User is in UTC+1 and selects ‘01/07/2013’ The actual C# DateTime object is instantiated as ‘30/06/2013 23:00’ We expect to get ‘01/07/2013 00:00:00’

We are currently using the following setting in Global.asax :

GlobalConfiguration.Configuration.Formatters.JsonFormatter.SerializerSettings.DateTimeZoneHandliig = Newtonsoft.Json.DateTimeZoneHandling.Local;

Could you please advise?

Answer 1

The problem is the conversion gets all borked up between JavaScript Date and C# DateTime. What I do is I convert the date into a string prior to it being posted to the server. You can hook into the Kendo DataSource's parameterMap function to do this.

Using the parameterMap function:

var ds = new kendo.data.DataSource({
  transport: {
    parameterMap: function(data, type) {
      if (type === 'create' || type === 'update') {
        // this changes the date to 'dd/MM/YYYY' format
        data.date = kendo.toString(data.date, 'd');
      }
      return data;
    }
  }
});

I also set the JsonFormatter.SerializerSettings.DateFormatString = "YYYY/dd/MM hh:mm:ss" because JavaScript can convert this to a Date object without error or other wonkiness. I would also recommend changing your DateTimeZoneHandling to UTC. You don't need the timezone offset, do you?

On the server-side in your controller, you can use DateTime.Parse() or let the compiler do the conversion implicitly.