For those using Web Api to deliver json payloads, you might come across an issue relating to dates, more specifically, timezones.

The ISO8601 date format is becoming the defacto format for date strings and is now the default for the default Web Api serialiser, Json.Net.

The ISO8601 date specification explicitly states what happens when the TZD (or time zone designator) is ommited. Read more here. It states:

If no UTC relation information is given with a time representation, the time is assumed to be in local time.

Entity Framework

We should always store datetime as UTC in the database. However, when we are retrieving an Entity Framework model, date properties are given a DateTime.DateKind of Unspecified. When the Json.Net serialiser serialises this, it has to assume that the datetime is not UTC and so the date will serialise to a string as 2013-09-19T07:00:00 rather than 2013-09-19T07:00:00Z <— see the ‘Z’ bit? That’s the TZD UTC indicator. This is a fair call from Json.Net.

There is no easy way to get Entity Framework (Code First) to set the DateKind to UTC without either reflecting through each and every property when a model is retrieved by the DbContext (by subscribing to the ObjectContext.ObjectMaterialized event) or by adopting a more manual approach using:

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DateTime.SpecifyKind(myDate, DateTimeKind.Utc);

on each datetime property.

EcmaScript 5

Now onto another (related) issue. For some reason I cannot fathom, the ECMAScript 5 ISO8601 specification differs fundamentally from the ISO spec:

The value of an absent time zone offset is “Z”.

So those implementing to the ISO spec will handle the date as 7am local time whereas those implementing to ECMAScript 5 spec will handle as 7am UTC. Not nice.

To handle this, we need to always pass UTC dates from our web Api and, because we are doing this, we can enforce the serialiser to append the UTC TZD of Z by adding this to the Web Api configuration:

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 var jsonFormatter = GlobalConfiguration.Configuration.Formatters.JsonFormatter;
 jsonFormatter.SerializerSettings.DateTimeZoneHandling = DateTimeZoneHandling.Utc;

It’s a pretty blunt approach but it works p