Question

An ajax request sends a date value in WCF format? It’s a javascript date object converted to a string WCF can deserialize using the DataContractSerializer.

"/Date(1342210377000)/"

the client used to send this data to a WCF service, but now this is sent to an asp.net mvc controller. Does anyone know how I can deserialize that string into a c# DateTime without doing a bun of string.replace operations? Is there an existing .NET serializer I can leverage? I looked at using the DataContractSerializer but it’s readobject method takes a stream or xmlreader. I could not figure out how convert a modelbindercontext.valueprovider value to a stream object the serializer could use. If anyone knows how I can correctly convert that string I would love to learn how. Thanks for any tips, tricks, code, links, etc…

Answer 1

You can use the DataContractJsonSerializer to convert that into a DateTime value:

var str = "\"/Date(1342210377000)/\"";
var dcjs = new DataContractJsonSerializer(typeof(DateTime));
var ms = new MemoryStream(Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(str));
var dt = dcjs.ReadObject(ms);
Console.WriteLine(dt);