Backstory: In a project I am working on, I am storing all times in the database as UTC. When I get the values from the database, I want to convert the times to local time to be displayed in my client. There’s many articles on this, that involve changing to local time on the server before shipping to client, which I didn’t care for (for example, hooking into the ObjectMaterialized event on the ObjectContext and using reflection). This had to be done on the client itself to take advantage of the client’s time zone.
I didn’t want to convert them all by hand, either. What if I added D/T properties later? If it’s nullable, then it’s an extra line of code to check that it’s not null first. What about an object graph (nested objects)? It sounded like a lot of work, until I cobbled together this code from a couple sources and reworked it a bit to do what I want:
/// <summary>
/// Since all dates in the DB are stored as UTC, this converts dates to the local time using the Windows time zone settings.
/// </summary>
public static class AllDateTimesAsUTC
{
/// <summary>
/// Specifies that an object's dates are coming in as UTC.
/// </summary>
/// <typeparam name="T"></typeparam>
/// <param name="obj"></param>
/// <returns></returns>
public static T AllDatesAreUTC<T>(this T obj)
{
if (obj == null)
{
return default(T);
}
IterateDateTimeProperties(obj);
return obj;
}
private static void IterateDateTimeProperties(object obj)
{
if (obj == null)
{
return;
}
var properties = obj.GetType().GetProperties();
//Set all DaetTimeKinds to Utc
foreach (var prop in properties)
{
var t = prop.PropertyType;
if (t == typeof(DateTime) || t == typeof(DateTime?))
{
SpecifyUtcKind(prop, obj);
}
else if (t.IsEnumerable())
{
var vals = prop.GetValue(obj, null);
if (vals != null)
{
foreach (object o in (IEnumerable)vals)
{
IterateDateTimeProperties(o);
}
}
}
else
{
var val = prop.GetValue(obj, null);
if (val != null)
{
IterateDateTimeProperties(val);
}
}
}
//properties.ForEach(property => SpecifyUtcKind(property, obj));
return; // obj;
}
private static void SpecifyUtcKind(PropertyInfo property, object value)
{
//Get the datetime value
var datetime = property.GetValue(value, null);
DateTime output;
//set DateTimeKind to Utc
if (property.PropertyType == typeof(DateTime))
{
output = DateTime.SpecifyKind((DateTime)datetime, DateTimeKind.Utc);
}
else if (property.PropertyType == typeof(DateTime?))
{
var nullable = (DateTime?)datetime;
if (!nullable.HasValue) return;
output = (DateTime)DateTime.SpecifyKind(nullable.Value, DateTimeKind.Utc);
}
else
{
return;
}
Debug.WriteLine(" ***** Converted date from {0} to {1}.", datetime, output);
datetime = output.ToLocalTime();
//And set the Utc DateTime value
property.SetValue(value, datetime, null);
}
internal static Type[] ConvertibleTypes = {typeof(bool), typeof(byte), typeof(char),
typeof(DateTime), typeof(decimal), typeof(double), typeof(float), typeof(int),
typeof(long), typeof(sbyte), typeof(short), typeof(string), typeof(uint),
typeof(ulong), typeof(ushort)};
/// <summary>
/// Returns true if this Type matches any of a set of Types.
/// </summary>
/// <param name="types">The Types to compare this Type to.</param>
public static bool In(this Type type, params Type[] types)
{
foreach (Type t in types) if (t.IsAssignableFrom(type)) return true; return false;
}
/// <summary>
/// Returns true if this Type is one of the types accepted by Convert.ToString()
/// (other than object).
/// </summary>
public static bool IsConvertible(this Type t) { return t.In(ConvertibleTypes); }
/// <summary>
/// Gets whether this type is enumerable.
/// </summary>
public static bool IsEnumerable(this Type t)
{
return typeof(IEnumerable).IsAssignableFrom(t);
}
/// <summary>
/// Returns true if this property's getter is public, has no arguments, and has no
/// generic type parameters.
/// </summary>
public static bool SimpleGetter(this PropertyInfo info)
{
MethodInfo method = info.GetGetMethod(false);
return method != null && method.GetParameters().Length == 0 &&
method.GetGenericArguments().Length == 0;
}
}
How do you use it? To change aall dates on an object sent to the client via WCF, this is how it’s done:
void svc_ZOut_GetZOutSummaryCompleted(object sender, ZOut_GetZOutSummaryCompletedEventArgs e)
{
svc.ZOut_GetZOutSummaryCompleted -= new EventHandler<ZOut_GetZOutSummaryCompletedEventArgs>(svc_ZOut_GetZOutSummaryCompleted);
svc = null;
var whenDone = (Action<bool, ZOutResult>)e.UserState;
if (e.Error != null)
{
FireOnExceptionRaised(e.Error);
whenDone(false, null);
}
else
{
var res = e.Result.AllDatesAreUTC();
FireOnSessionReceived(res.IsError, res.Session);
if (res.IsError == true)
{
whenDone(false, null);
}
else
{
whenDone(true, res.Result);
}
}
}
That’s it! It handles a whole object graph, DateTime and nullable DateTime obejcts.
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