Question

I have a system that takes information from an external source and then stores it to be displayed later.

One of the data items is a date. On the source system they have the concept of a fuzzy date i.e. not accurate to a specific day or sometimes not to a month as well. So I get dates in the format:

dd/mm/yyyy
mm/yyyy
yyyy

I can parse these to DateTime objects and work with these but when rendering later I need to be able to determine the accuracy of the date since parsing “2010” will result in a date of “01/01/2010”. I want to show just the year so need to know it’s original accuracy.

I’ve mocked up a quick class to deal with this:

public class FuzzyDate
{
    public DateTime Date { get; set; }
    public DateType Type { get; set; }
}

public enum DateType
{
    DayMonthYear,
    MonthYear,
    Year
}

This will do the job for me and I can do something on the parse to handle it but I feel like this is probably quite a common problem and there is probably an existing cleaner solution.

Is there something built into .Net to do this? I had a look at the culture stuff but that didn’t quite seem right.

Any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

To answer your question: There is nothing built into .NET to handle this gracefully.

Your solution is as valid as any I’ve seen. You will probably wish to embellish your class with overrides to the ToString() method that will render your date appropriately based on the DateType.

Here are a couple other threads that attempt to address this question:

• Strategy for Incomplete Dates

• Implementing a "Partial Date" object

Good luck!