How to get the start and end times of a day

Question

In my C# app, I pass a string variable that is of format yyyymmdd-yyyymmdd that represents a from and to date. I want to get the start and end times for these dates respecti

Answer 1

For SQL Server (version 2008 R2 tested) this ranges works.

StarDate '2016-01-11 00:00:01.990' EndDate '2016-01-19 23:59:59.990'

Seems like ticks is greater that the last second of day and automatically round to next day. So i test and works, i made a dummy table with two dates for check what values is sql server catching and inserting in the stored procedure those parameters.

Answer 2

I am surprised to see how an incorrect answer received so many upvotes:

The correct version would be as follows:

public static DateTime StartOfDay(this DateTime theDate)
{
    return theDate.Date;
}

public static DateTime EndOfDay(this DateTime theDate)
{
    return theDate.Date.AddDays(1).AddTicks(-1);
}

Answer 3

If you are only worried about .Net precision...

startDate = DateTime.ParseExact(dates[0], "yyyyMMdd");
endDate = DateTime.ParseExact(dates[1], "yyyyMMdd").AddTicks(-1).AddDays(1);

You really don't need to concatenate extra values onto the string for the time portion.

---

As an addendum, if you are using this for a query against, for example, a database...

startDate = DateTime.ParseExact(dates[0], "yyyyMMdd");
endDate = DateTime.ParseExact(dates[1], "yyyyMMdd").AddDays(1);

With a query of...

WHERE "startDate" >= @startDate AND "endDate" < @endDate

Then the precision issues noted in the comments won't really matter. The endDate in this case would not be part of the range, but the outside boundary.

Answer 4

I think we're doing it wrong. There is no such thing as the end of the day. AddTick(-1) only works under the convention that there are no time intervals smaller than a tick. Which is implementation dependent. Admittedly the question comes with a reference implementation, namely the .Net Framework DateTime class, but still we should take this as a clue that the function we really want is not EndOfDay() but StartOfNextDay()

public static DateTime StartOfNextDay(this DateTime date)
{
    return date.Date.AddDays(1);
}