Question

I am integrating with a web service (i dont have control to this web service) using wsdl provided. While calling a method, i need to pass DateTime in request. The request needs to contain datetime in UTC format (with Z in the end). The request contains below field,

[System.Xml.Serialization.XmlElementAttribute(DataType="date", Order=0)]
public System.DateTime date
{
   get
    {
       return this.dateField;
     }
    set
    {
    this.dateField = value;
  }

Please note the xsd datatype is a date.

I construct the request to pass DateTime as Utc,

request.date = DateTime.SpecifyKind(DateTime.Parse(DateTime.Now.ToUniversalTime().ToString("yyyy'-'MM'-'dd'T'HH':'mm':'ss'.'fff'Z'")), DateTimeKind.Utc);

The problem i have is even though i pass DateTime as Utc, the soap request appears without the time zone. For eg, the request gets generated as shown below,

           <GetRequest xmlns=" http://soa.company.com/services/example/v2"> 
              <date>2001-01-01</date> 
           </GetRequest>

My expectation is to get,

           <GetRequest xmlns=" http://soa.company.com/services/example/v2"> 
              <date>2001-01-01Z</date> 
           </GetRequest>

I think this is due to roundtrip during datetime serialization. Has anybody faced this kind of issue?

Answer 1

Ok , Finally solved this.Link Force XmlSerializer to serialize DateTime as 'YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm:ss' was very useful. I added a string attribute similar to the one described in the link above and that seems to have fixed the issue.

/// <remarks/>
[System.Xml.Serialization.XmlIgnore]
public System.DateTime date
{
    get
    {
        return this.dateField;
    }
    set
    {
        this.dateField = value;
    }
}

/// <remarks/>

[System.Xml.Serialization.XmlElementAttribute("date", Order = 0)]
public System.String somedate
{
    get { return this.date.ToString("yyyy'-'MM'-'dd'Z'"); }
    set { this.date = System.DateTime.Parse(value); }

}

However, modifying generated proxy is definitely not the preferred way.