How to do timezones in ASP.NET MVC?

Question

For this purpose, you should definitely be storing your timestamps in UTC in the database.

When you need to display a date from the database on your site, you can do this:

DateTime stamp = /* get datetime from the database here, make sure you
                    use the constructor that allows you to specify the 
                    DateTimeKind as UTC. */

//E.g.
//DateTime stamp = new DateTime(2009, 12, 12, 12, 12, 12, DateTimeKind.Utc);

timeZoneInfo = TimeZoneInfo.FindSystemTimeZoneById(" /* users time zone here */"); 
var convertedTime = TimeZoneInfo.ConvertTime(stamp, timeZoneInfo);

//Print out the date and time
//Console.WriteLine(convertedTime.ToString("yyyy-MM-dd HH-mm-ss"));

The list of timezones is already available in .Net, so you can see this post on how to enumerate them. For ASP.Net MVC, instead of printing the time out, you would want to assign the converted datetime to a property of your model class so your View could use it for display.

Leave a Comment Cancel reply