Servicestack POSTing DateTime issue

Question

Weirdly, this works locally but when it's deployed to an Azure website it doesn't

The POST variables that fail on Azure are:

name=Test&venue=1&fromDate=26%2F06%2F14&toDate=01%2F07%2F14&eventType=1

If I POST the following it works:

name=Test&venue=1&eventType=1

So it must be something to do with the date format.

The data type on the request is a DateTime, if I set this to string it works - I can then call request.ConvertTo<Model> and everything is passed over as expected. I just don't want to set the fromDate and toDate to be strings on the request.

Does anyone know why this would fail?

Answer 1

That looks like a globalization issue. The Azure servers will be using en-US culture that expects the dates in mm/dd/yy format for parsing.

But you are using UK date format dd/mm/yy, so the culture is en-GB. Your development machine will be set to use the en-GB locale already, hence no problems when testing locally.

You can specify the culture in your web.config:

<configuration>
    <system.web>
        <globalization uiCulture="en-GB" culture="en-GB" />
    </system.web>
</configuration>

Or you can do so at runtime in global.asax:

public void PreRequestHandlerExecute(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = CultureInfo.CreateSpecificCulture("en-GB");
}

Or you could modify how ServiceStack.Text deserializes DateTime, but I wouldn't recommend that approach. In the AppHost Configure method:

JsConfig<DateTime>.DeSerializeFn = date => DateTime.ParseExact(date, "dd/MM/yy", CultureInfo.InvariantCulture);

Hope that helps.