Getting Started with Noda Time

Question

I am looking to use Noda time for a fairly simple application, however I am struggling to find any documentation to handle a very basic use case:

I have a logged in user

Answer 1

I was planning on converting these times to UTC/Noda Instants to prevent the need to store all the time zone info with each date in the database.

That's fine if you don't need to know the original time zone later on. (e.g. if the user changes time zone, but still wants something recurring in the original time zone).

Anyway, I would separate this out into three steps:

• Parsing into a LocalDateTime
• Converting that into a ZonedDateTime
• Converting that into an Instant

Something like:

// TODO: Are you sure it *will* be in the invariant culture? No funky date
// separators?
// Note that if all users have the same pattern, you can make this a private
// static readonly field somewhere
var pattern = LocalDateTimePattern.CreateWithInvariantCulture("yyyy/MM/dd HH:mm");

var parseResult = pattern.Parse(userSubmittedDateTimeString);
if (!parseResult.Success)
{
    // throw an exception or whatever you want to do
}

var localDateTime = parseResult.Value;

var timeZone = DateTimeZoneProviders.Tzdb[userTimeZone];

// TODO: Consider how you want to handle ambiguous or "skipped" local date/time
// values. For example, you might want InZoneStrictly, or provide your own custom
// handler to InZone.
var zonedDateTime = localDateTime.InZoneLeniently(timeZone);

var instant = zonedDateTime.ToInstant();