Question

I have an object that has DateTime properties, I am wondering if there is a way to override the default format that gets converted for Json responses.

Answer 1

Unfortunately no, the date format is fixed on .NET 3.5 and 4.0.

There is a workaround – which isn’t too pretty – which is to declare auxiliary properties to be serialized of type string, similar to the example below. It works, but you need to do it for every DateTime property in your object graph.

[DataContract]
public class MyType
{
    public DateTime MyDTProp { get; set; }
    [DataMember(Name = "MyDTProp")]
    private string strDate
    {
        get
        {
            return this.MyDTProp.ToString("yyyy/MM/dd");
        }
        set
        {
            this.MyDTProp = DateTime.Parse(value);
        }
    }
}