I’m currently working on a full stack application that has never had to be conscious of time zone, but looks like it will soon need to be a bit more versatile in terms of being aware of local time zone and daylight savings etc.

I was thinking that the following steps might be the bones of a solution:

• Allow the front-end application to use the local time of the machine (for selecting from date-time picker components, etc).
• When data is posted to the API, be it to create or query a record, any DateTime or DateTimeOffset values (both are used at present) it is sent in local time in the JSON payload but then, once received, converted from local time to UTC. This will mean it can be in UTC form to be used in any business logic or for storing in the DB.
• At the point that any data is returned from the API to the client (e.g. a GET request), the client will receive the data in its UTC form and then convert it to the local time of the machine for display purposes etc.

I tried to execute this using some extension methods I wrote, that would check the members of the deserialized requests/responses and adjust any DateTime or DateTimeOffset fields accordingly. It worked ok in simple enough cases, but increasingly became a minefield as the objects got more complex and involved nested objects, enumerables, etc.

What I’m now wondering if the JSON deserialization process would have the facility to consistently deserialize values to a desired time zone. I’ve had a look around but can’t find anything concrete, so wondered if asking here might get a fresh perspective.

I’m open to any and all ideas, so if the approach I’ve outlined above isn’t ideal or I’ve overlooked something along the way, feel free to let me know!

Thanks,
Mark