ASP.NET MVC DateTime手动输入转换最佳实践

Question

I have ASP.NET MVC site with ordinary Html Form with text field to put Date in.

<input type="textbox" name="date"/>

Controller method looks like:

void DoSomething(DateTime date)
{
 ....
}

As users have different locales and habits how to enter date how shall I handle DateTime formats? I guess there should be code that try to parse string to several date time formats. Can I handle all DateTime(s) params centralized without Helper class call every time controller expects DateTime ? How can I take into account user locale ?

Thank you in advance!

Answer 1

You can use jQuery UI datepicker for example, and set the format. This will also be a better user experience then a simple textbox..

$('#datetime').datepicker({ format: 'yy-mm-dd hh:ii' });

Datepicker provides support for localizing its content to cater for different languages and date formats.

Answer 2

Best practice here is to force users to enter only one date format.

You can achieve this with RegularExpression validation and date picker such as JQuery Datepicker .

UPDATE :

Also, if you not want to force users to one format, please check DateTime.Parse method of C# but it is a little tricky and you need to be careful while using it. There might be some conflicts. (Eg 2011-01-01 can be seen as two different dates if you don't know the format.)

Answer 3

If you try to handle every type of formats you will have to provide the type of the format. Issue that is commonly faced is mm-dd-yy and dd-mm-yy format say 02-01-11. Question is is it 2 Jan or 1 Feb.

If you are able to send the correct format type there shouldn't be any problem other than the input string could be wrong itself.

The best solution (which you may not be looking for) is to validate date/time while user inputs in the form. Like making separate drop down box(or just text box) for date and month.