Local and UTC Dates in NHibernate

Published by Adam Tybor on October 9, 2007 07:36 pm under Development

How do you get a UTC datetime hydrated from NHibernate? Dan Morphis addressed this a while ago with an interceptor.

I proposed a patch to NHibernate that adds UtcDateTime and LocalDateTime data types that will specifically get hydrated with the proper DateTimeKind value instead of DateTimeKind.Unspecified.

Usage
<property name="MyDate" type="UtcDateTime"></property>
<property name="LocalDate" type="LocalDateTime"></property>

You download the patch from Jira, and vote for it if you like it.

28CommentsLocal+and+UTC+Dates+in+NHibernate2007-10-10+01%3A36%3A54Adam+Tybor

Dan Morphis on November 1st, 2007

Adam, its good to know someone found my post useful!
hangy on April 30th, 2008

I stumbled upon your blog post and the bug tracker entry while searching on this issue. After all, I guess the idea solution of using a custom data type is better than Dan’s interceptor, because it should use less resources. Anyways, it would be nice if the type also checked that the given DateTime object if of DateTimeKind.UTC or converts it to that. Of course, this behaviour would need documentation, but using solely your solution would allow someone to fill the DB with DateTimeKind.Local or DateTimeKind.Unspecified dates without problem, thus giving really weird dates if those were read from the database (as DateTimeKind.UTC, using your patch) and then converted to a local time in order to be displayed to a client or on a website.
Adam Tybor on May 6th, 2008

@hangy… That is why applications should be running unit and integration tests.

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