Handling Time Zone across from UI to DB

So I thought about writing a bit about handling date variables across WebAPI to Angular.

The Problem


When saving date / datetime values sent from the front end how do we keep the timezone information and how do we show them back on the UI.

For example let's say you use a simple online note taking application. You wrote a note 8 am in the morning when you were in WA. Now you are looking at your notes from Vic and what time do you want the note to show as the created date/time ?

Well I can't tell you what time you should show as it's a business case but I can tell you how to store the time information so that regardless of what time you need to show, you can achieve that.


The Solution

Code on GitHub 



What the code demos......

On the WebAPI side

You can store the date time values in 2 ways


  • As UTC values in a DateTime variable in SQL Server
  • In a DateTimeOffset variable in SQL server with the actual date time. The advantage of this is that you can actually know which time zone the input originated from.

On the Front End

I have demoed sending of the data from the Angular front end to the WebAPI layer using the following 2 libraries in the code.









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