get date selected by user without timezone

Question

I have a few date fields in my form for which I am using JqueryUI datepicker for the user to select the date. The date should be displayed in dd/mm/yy format when the user selects a date. I am using KnockoutJS to manage data binding on client side and using the following KO binding handler for JqueryUI datepicker :

ko.bindingHandlers.datepicker = {
    init: function (element, valueAccessor, allBindingsAccessor) {
        var options = allBindingsAccessor().datepickerOptions || { dateFormat: 'dd/mm/yy' };
        $(element).datepicker(options);

        ko.utils.registerEventHandler(element, "change", function () {
            var observable = valueAccessor();
            observable($(element).datepicker("getDate"));
        });

        ko.utils.domNodeDisposal.addDisposeCallback(element, function () {
            $(element).datepicker("destroy");
        });

    },
    update: function (element, valueAccessor) {
        var value = ko.utils.unwrapObservable(valueAccessor()),
            current = $(element).datepicker("getDate");


        if (value - current !== 0) {
            $(element).datepicker("setDate", value);
        }
    }
};

Now when the user selects the date, it is displayed correctly in dd/mm/yy format in the input text field and a javascript Date object along with timezone is getting captured in the KO observable . I am using ko.toJSON() function to convert the entire complex javascript object which contains various date fields to a JSON string and deserializing it in the backend.

The problem I am facing is when the javascript Date object is converted to JSON string, it reduces one day from the user selected date which I am assuming is because of the local timezone and this is the default behaviour javascript date objects. I have also tried the momentJs library to get UTC date from the selected date using the following code but this doesn't seem to work:

moment.utc(selectedDateObject).toDate()

What I want is to get whatever date the user selected in the form using the datepicker without any time zones, plain and simple. How can I go about this? Date object seems to get unnecessarily complicated in javascript.

Answer 1

You need to override toJSON function of moment.

Please see Moment Docs for more details, but basically you need to do something like this

moment.fn.toJSON = function () {
    return this.format('YYYY-MM-DDTHH:mm:ss'); //Or any desired format
};