.Net Jonesie - AJAX JSON DateTime Serialization

Monday, January 15, 2007

AJAX JSON DateTime Serialization by Peter

I've been doing a lot of fun JSON stuff lately using ASP.Net AJAX (aka ATLAS). This really is Fun with a capital 'F' but I struck a small problem today.

Given the following C# class:

public class PageData {

    public string Name;

    public string Address;

    public DateTime DOB;

    ...

}

I serailize this to the page thus:

protected void getPageData() {

PageData pd = new PageData("Peter Jones", "New Zealand", DateTime.Now());

return "(" + JavascriptSerializer.Serializer(pd) + ")";

}

ASP:

var pagedata = eval('<%= getPageData() %>');

</script>

Now this works fine for all data types except DateTime. When you serialize a DateTime you get a value in JSON like this:

@7895678963897@

This is the number of milliseconds since 1 Jan 1970. When this is de-serialized with eval() you just get a string.

Instead of using eval() you need to use Sys.Serialization.JavaScriptSerializer.deserialize().

For reference see: nikhilk.net and Hannes Preishuber

Update

This appears to have changed in the RTM release. Dates are now serialized thus: /Date(millseconds)/. However, I cant get this to deserialize using Sys.Serialization.JavaScriptSerializer.deserialize() so have reverted to using a string in yyyymmddThhmm format, which Date.parse() will happily convert.

Monday, January 15, 2007 8:34:28 AM (New Zealand Daylight Time, UTC+13:00)

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