Question

I’m working on a Windows 8 Metro application that references a c# WinRT project. Among other things, the c# project makes web requests to an Azure service to perform CRUD operations against a SQL Azure database.

When performing a POST operation on the service, I’m serializing an instance of a class and putting it in the body of the request.

public sealed class Foo
{
    int FooId { get; set; }
    DateTimeOffset FooDate { get; set; }
}

When this is serialized using the DataContractJSONSerializer, the result is something like this:

{"FooId":1,"FooDate":{"DateTime":"/Date(1342732970000)/","OffsetMinutes":-420}}

FYI that this is 7/19/2012 2:22:50PM -07:00.

OK great … Only problem is that the Azure service is expecting just a DateTime, not a DateTimeOffset. I don’t own the Azure service so I can’t change its behavior.

So (ignoring that I’m losing the offset) what I need is this to serialize into:

{"FooId":1,"FooDate":"/Date(1342732970)/"}

My first approach was to add a new aliased DateTime property/datamember to the class with a getter that returns the DateTime portion of the DateTimeOffset. However, WinRT doesn’t support the DateTime type.

There are a couple of hacky ways to get around this, but I wanted to see if there’s an elegant way to do this before resorting to one of these:

• Regex on the serialization result before the POST
• String property on the class that returns a JSON formatted date

Thanks

Answer 1

I ended up implementing a property on the class with a getter that formats the date appropriately.

I decorated the Foo field with the IgnoreDataMember attribute so that it gets ignored during serialization. I then added a new field and gave it the alias of Foo for serialization.

Thanks