Formatting Date of a collection in an Anonymous Object

Question

I got a business layer which returns an anonymous object which has a collection of rows which have dates. I want to get regional formatting of the dates, but I don't want to pass the regional setting into the business layer, instead keeping the formatting in the Controller Action of the MVC website.

Biz Layer:

public object GetItems(int catID)
{
 var data = GetDbItems(catId).ToList();
 var Items = new 
         {
            total = data.Count(),
            page = 1,
            rows = (from c in data
                    select new {
                       ID = c.id,
                       Desc = c.desc,
                       CreationDate = c.CreationDate
                    })
         };

 return Items;
}

back in the Action Method of the controller I want to format the date in the collection inside of the anonymous type. How can I do this?

public JsonResult GetItems(int catID)
{
 string cultureString = HttpContext.Request.UserLanguages.FirstOrDefault();
 DateTimeFormatInfo dtfi = CultureInfo.CreateSpecificCulture(cultureString).DateTimeFormat;
 var items = bizLayer.GetItems(catID);
 var test = from i in items
       select i.rows;  // ????  doesn't know about this collection yet.
 }

What I want to do.

get at the rows collection of the anonymous type, find the date column and format it with

CreateDate = c.CreateDate.ToString("d", dtfi)

Answer 1

I got a business layer which returns an anonymous object

That's probably the first thing that needs to be fixed and replace this anonymous object by a strongly typed model which would greatly simplify the mapping of this domain model to a view model in order to perform the desired formatting.

Answer 2

You can't. You need to make a concrete class with the same properties as your anonymous object(s) and pass back a YourNewClass instead of an object .

Answer 3

Why the business layer returns an anonymous object is certainly vague, you should fix that first. But if you can't the best shot you've got is parsing each element as a DateTime; and then reusing that information for the rest of the rows.