What is the “right” JSON date format?

Question

I\'ve seen so many different standards for the JSON date format:

\"\\\"\\\\/Date(1335205592410)\\\\/\\\"\"         .NET JavaScriptSerializer
\"\\\"\\\\/Date(         


        

Answer 1

There is only one correct answer to this and most systems get it wrong. Number of milliseconds since epoch, aka a 64 bit integer. Time Zone is a UI concern and has no business in the app layer or db layer. Why does your db care what time zone something is, when you know it's going to store it as a 64 bit integer then do the transformation calculations.

Strip out the extraneous bits and just treat dates as numbers up to the UI. You can use simple arithmetic operators to do queries and logic.