Prevent timezone conversion on deserialization of DateTime value

Question

I have a class that I serialize/deserialize using XmlSerializer. This class contains a DateTime field.

When serialized, the DateTime field is represented by a string that includes the offset from GMT, e.g 2010-05-05T09:13:45-05:00. When deserialized, these times are converted to the local time of the machine performing the deserialization.

For reasons not worth explaining, I'd like to prevent this timezone conversion from happening. The serialization happens out in the wild, where multiple version of this class exist. The deserialization happens on a server that's under my control. As such, it seems like this would be best handled during deserialization.

How can I make this happen, other than implementing IXmlSerializable and doing all of the deserialization "by hand?"

Answer 1

Instead of parsing as a DateTime you can parse it as a DateTimeOffset and use the DateTimeOffset.DateTime property to ignore the timezone. Like this:

[XmlIgnore()]
public DateTime Time { get; set; }

[XmlElement(ElementName = "Time")]
public string XmlTime
{
    get { return XmlConvert.ToString(Time, XmlDateTimeSerializationMode.RoundtripKind); }
    set { Time = DateTimeOffset.Parse(value).DateTime; }
}

Answer 2

Could you try something like this post suggests and make a new string property and XmlIgnore the existing one:

Put [XmlIgnore] on the Time property.

Then add a new property:

[XmlElement(DataType="string",ElementName="Time")]
public String TimeString
{
   get { return this.timeField.ToString("yyyy-MM-dd"); }
   set { this.timeField = DateTime.ParseExact(value, "yyyy-MM-dd", CultureInfo.InvariantCulture); }
}