Question

I’m attempting to parse JSON response to convert ASP.NET dates to javascript dates.

The actual response looks like so:

{"Id":1,"Title":null,"Description":null,"Content":null,"PropagateModel":false,"Status":0,"ComponentPublishDate":"\/Date(1340299653555)\/"}

I extended the javascript string object to do the regex conversion from \/Date(1340299653555)\/ to new Date(1340298914781)

String.prototype.parseWithJSONDate = function () {
   return this.replace(/\/Date\((.*?)\)\//gi, 'new Date($1)');
};

Then i setup a converter filter to do the actual parsing.

    $.ajaxSetup({
      dataFilter: function(data, dataType) {
        if (dataType === "json") {
          return data.parseWithJSONDate();
        }
        return data;
      }
    });

This converter doesn’t work. The first issue i had with it was that the response would get corrupted somehow after the converter returns. I fixed that by calling JSON.parse like so return JSON.parse(res) at the end of function. Why in the world do i need to parse a string that’s already a JSON string??

The second issue is that actual regex doesn’t appear to be replacing values. The odd thing is i tested it outside of the function on a sample JSON string and it worked just fine.

Can anybody suggest anything? Thanks!

UPDATE 1
I think i figured out the answer to my first question. My converter was running for json and text data types. Which is likely the reason why i had to explicitly convert the return value to JSON. I removed text data type from the converter and updated the rest of the code accordingly.

UPDATE 2
I ended up creating a new view model where date is a formatted string. Not the best thing in world, but better than screwing around with jQuery ajax events.

Answer 1

I ended up converting all dates to appropriate format on the server and returning the value to client. Not the optimal solution, but i couldn’t figure out how to convert with data filters.