Force XmlSerializer to serialize DateTime as 'YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm:ss'

Question

I have a XSD schema for some RESTful service. When used in conjunction with xsd.exe tool to generate C# code, XSD's xs:date generates the following code:

[System.Xml.Serialization.XmlElementAttribute(Form=System.Xml.Schema.XmlSchemaForm.Unqualified, DataType="date")]
public System.DateTime time {
    get {
        return this.timeField;
    }
    set {
        this.timeField = value;
    }
}

When deserializing XML to objects using XmlSerializer all seems to be well. The problem I am facing is that the service expects dates to be formatted as YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm:ss and the XSD generated code seems to produce only YYYY-MM-DD.

If I modify XSD manually to xs:dateTime type, the generated C# code produces: 2010-08-20T20:07:03.915039Z.

Basically, how do I force serialization to produce YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm:ss? Is there something to do to XSD or is there something I can do to alter generated C# code?

Answer 1

In the past, I've done the following to control datetime serialization:

• Ignore the DateTime property.
• Create a dummy string property that serializes/deserializes the way I want

Here is an example:

public class SomeClass
{
    [XmlIgnore]
    public DateTime SomeDate { get; set; }

    [XmlElement("SomeDate")]
    public string SomeDateString
    {
        get { return this.SomeDate.ToString("yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss"); }
        set { this.SomeDate = DateTime.Parse(value); }
    }
}

Answer 2

I believe implementing IXmlSerializable interface will do a trick. You can then control how you serialize and deserialize your object.