Question

In my app, article.DatePublished is a nullable DateTime field. Now I have this following code:

      list.Add(article.DatePublished.Ticks);

Here I am getting a compile error as Ticks property does not work with nullable DateTimes.

One way of handling this is:

if (article.DatePublished != null)
      list.Add(((DateTime)article.DatePublished).Ticks);

This works, but is this an elegant solution? Or can we make it “better”?

Thanks,

Vivek

Answer 1

You need to get at the .Value property of the DateTime?.

if (nullableDate != null) // or if (nullableDate.HasValue)
    ticks = nullableDate.Value.Ticks;

You could otherwise use nullableDate.GetValueOrDefault().Ticks, which would normalize a null date into the default value of DateTime, which is DateTime.MinValue.