How do I format a Microsoft JSON date?

Question

I'm taking my first crack at Ajax with jQuery. I'm getting my data onto my page, but I'm having some trouble with the JSON data that is returned for Date data types. Basically, I'm getting a string back that looks like this:

/Date(1224043200000)/

From someone totally new to JSON - How do I format this to a short date format? Should this be handled somewhere in the jQuery code? I've tried the jQuery.UI.datepicker plugin using $.datepicker.formatDate() without any success.

FYI: Here's the solution I came up with using a combination of the answers here:

function getMismatch(id) {
  $.getJSON("Main.aspx?Callback=GetMismatch",
    { MismatchId: id },

    function (result) {
      $("#AuthMerchId").text(result.AuthorizationMerchantId);
      $("#SttlMerchId").text(result.SettlementMerchantId);
      $("#CreateDate").text(formatJSONDate(Date(result.AppendDts)));
      $("#ExpireDate").text(formatJSONDate(Date(result.ExpiresDts)));
      $("#LastUpdate").text(formatJSONDate(Date(result.LastUpdateDts)));
      $("#LastUpdatedBy").text(result.LastUpdateNt);
      $("#ProcessIn").text(result.ProcessIn);
    }
  );

  return false;
}

function formatJSONDate(jsonDate) {
  var newDate = dateFormat(jsonDate, "mm/dd/yyyy");
  return newDate;
}

This solution got my object from the callback method and displayed the dates on the page properly using the date format library.

Answer 1

You also can use the JavaScript library moment.js, which comes in handy when you plan do deal with different localized formats and perform other operations with dates values:

function getMismatch(id) {
    $.getJSON("Main.aspx?Callback=GetMismatch",
    { MismatchId: id },

    function (result) {
        $("#AuthMerchId").text(result.AuthorizationMerchantId);
        $("#SttlMerchId").text(result.SettlementMerchantId);
        $("#CreateDate").text(moment(result.AppendDts).format("L"));
        $("#ExpireDate").text(moment(result.ExpiresDts).format("L"));
        $("#LastUpdate").text(moment(result.LastUpdateDts).format("L"));
        $("#LastUpdatedBy").text(result.LastUpdateNt);
        $("#ProcessIn").text(result.ProcessIn);
    }
    );
    return false;
}

Setting up localization is as easy as adding configuration files (you get them at momentjs.com) to your project and configuring the language:

moment.lang('de');

Answer 2

var newDate = dateFormat(jsonDate, "mm/dd/yyyy"); 

Is there another option without using the jQuery library?

Answer 3

Don't repeat yourself - automate date conversion using $.parseJSON()

Answers to your post provide manual date conversion to JavaScript dates. I've extended jQuery's $.parseJSON() just a little bit, so it's able to automatically parse dates when you instruct it to. It processes ASP.NET formatted dates (/Date(12348721342)/) as well as ISO formatted dates (2010-01-01T12.34.56.789Z) that are supported by native JSON functions in browsers (and libraries like json2.js).

Anyway. If you don't want to repeat your date conversion code over and over again I suggest you read this blog post and get the code that will make your life a little easier.

Answer 4

In jQuery 1.5, as long as you have json2.js to cover for older browsers, you can deserialize all dates coming from Ajax as follows:

(function () {
    var DATE_START = "/Date(";
    var DATE_START_LENGTH = DATE_START.length;

    function isDateString(x) {
        return typeof x === "string" && x.startsWith(DATE_START);
    }

    function deserializeDateString(dateString) {
        var dateOffsetByLocalTime = new Date(parseInt(dateString.substr(DATE_START_LENGTH)));
        var utcDate = new Date(dateOffsetByLocalTime.getTime() - dateOffsetByLocalTime.getTimezoneOffset() * 60 * 1000);
        return utcDate;
    }

    function convertJSONDates(key, value) {
      if (isDateString(value)) {
        return deserializeDateString(value);
      }
      return value;
    }

    window.jQuery.ajaxSetup({
      converters: {
        "text json": function(data) {
          return window.JSON.parse(data, convertJSONDates);
        }
      }
    });
}());

I included logic that assumes you send all dates from the server as UTC (which you should); the consumer then gets a JavaScript Date object that has the proper ticks value to reflect this. That is, calling getUTCHours(), etc. on the date will return the same value as it did on the server, and calling getHours() will return the value in the user's local timezone as determined by their browser.

This does not take into account WCF format with timezone offsets, though that would be relatively easy to add.

Answer 5

Everyone of these answers has one thing in common: they all store dates as a single value (usually a string).

Another option is to take advantage of the inherent structure of JSON, and represent a date as list of numbers:

{ "name":"Nick",
  "birthdate":[1968,6,9] }

Of course, you would have to make sure both ends of the conversation agree on the format (year, month, day), and which fields are meant to be dates,... but it has the advantage of completely avoiding the issue of date-to-string conversion. It's all numbers -- no strings at all. Also, using the order: year, month, day also allows proper sorting by date.

Just thinking outside the box here -- a JSON date doesn't have to be stored as a string.

Another bonus to doing it this way is that you can easily (and efficiently) select all records for a given year or month by leveraging the way CouchDB handles queries on array values.

Answer 6

var obj = eval('(' + "{Date: \/Date(1278903921551)\/}".replace(/\/Date\((\d+)\)\//gi, "new Date($1)") + ')');
var dateValue = obj["Date"];