Question

I have to compare a user entered date, “Dt” (in mm/dd/yyyy format) with the date in RavenDB – “ReleaseDate” (time stamp like “/Date(1187668800000)/”). For this I am using the following code which almost gets the job done, but I need little help to finalize loose ends…

How can I compare the two dates so I can get the query to run successfully.

    public ActionResult Calculation(DateTime? Dt)
    {             
        var store = new DocumentStore { Url = "http://localhost:80" };
        store.Initialize();

        var CalcModel = new CalcViewModel();

        using (var session = store.OpenSession())
        {       
         //Converting user entered date dt in mm/dd/yyyy format to total 
         //milliseconds - So that later I can compare this value to RavenDB
         //time stamp date format (older versions)

          DateTime d1 = new DateTime(1970, 1, 1);
          DateTime d2 = Dt.Value.ToUniversalTime();
          TimeSpan ts = new TimeSpan(d2.Ticks - d1.Ticks);

          double tmillisecs = ts.TotalMilliseconds; //Not yet using this value. 

          CalcModel.MoviesByDate = session.Query<Movies>()
                                   .Where(x => x.ReleaseDate.Ticks == ts.Ticks)            
                                   .Count();

          // this is where I need to compare two dates - ts.ticks gives the
          // required value of date (1187668800000) multiplied by 10000.
        }

        return View(CalcModel);

    }

Right now, when I debug I know what value ts.ticks is showing… and its like I said above in the code comments, the required value multiplied by 10000. But I have no clue at run time , what the value in x.ReleaseDate is or x.ReleaseDate.Ticks is.. am I doing this correctly. Thanks for the help.

Answer 1

Umm… I think you seriously misunderstand how SQL dates work, and how it applies to .NET. The whole point about dates is that they’re stored in a numeric format, not a text one. So when you have a DateTime object, it’s not stored as the text date, it’s stored as a numeric type that you can convert to any format you want.

Because the .net provider converts database native datetime objects to DateTime objects, you can just compare them natively. ie:

DateTime d1 = new DateTime(1970, 1, 1);
CalcModel.MoviesByDate = session.Query<Movies>()
                               .Where(x => x.ReleaseDates.Date == d1.Date)
                               .Count();

Regardless of how RavenDB stores the dates internally, when the DateTime object is materialized in the query, it will be in native .NET format.