Clemens Vasters

December 15, 2004

@ 12:37 PM

Just had to figure this out and thought I’d share. With the XmlSerializer (.NET v1.1), one would think that TimeSpan maps to the XML Schema type duration, but it doesn’t – for whatever reason. Anyways … here’s a trick to make it work. Interestingly enough, the XmlConvert class understands TimeSpan. However it does not work correctly with fractional seconds and ignores them. That’s enough for my purposes in the given app and therefore I am ignoring that issue in the snippet below and treat all times of less than one second as equivalent to zero. If it isn’t enough for you, you’d have to write an alternate implementation for the respective XmlConvert functionality or beg Microsoft to fix it. (Doug? ;-)

private TimeSpan interval;

[XmlElement("Interval", DataType="duration")]
public string IntervalXml
{
    get
    {
        if (Interval < TimeSpan.FromSeconds(1) )
        {
            return null;
        }
        else
        {
            return XmlConvert.ToString(interval);
        }
    }
    set
    {
        if (value == null )
        {
            interval = TimeSpan.Zero;
            return;
        }
        TimeSpan newInterval = XmlConvert.ToTimeSpan(value);
        if (interval == newInterval)
            return;
        interval = newInterval;
    }
}

[XmlIgnore]
public TimeSpan Interval
{
    get
    {
        return interval;
    }
    set
    {
        if (interval == value)
            return;
        interval = value;
    }
}

Categories: XML

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Wednesday, December 15, 2004 9:48:06 PM UTC

I had an irritating bug in RSS Bandit due to the fact that XmlSerializer doesn't serialize TimeSpans. What's really annoying is that instead of erroring it writes an empty element.

Grrrr.

kpako@yahoo.com (Dare Obasanjo)

Wednesday, December 15, 2004 10:02:09 PM UTC

http://dotnetjunkies.com/WebLog/bsblog/archive/2004/08/10/21612.aspx

I posted this a while ago. Admittedly a hack compared with using duration. Nice work!

Brendan F Tompkins

Thursday, December 16, 2004 12:01:17 AM UTC

Here is a similar hack that i have been usind for datetime and timespan.

private DateTime /*TimeSpan*/ _when; //date and time
[XmlIgnore]
public DateTime When {
get { return _when; }
set { _when = value; }
}

[XmlAttribute("When")] //[XmlElement] if you wish
public string WhenText {
// You can use any format that you want here.
get { return string.Format("{0:mm/dd/yyyy hh:mm:ss", _when); }
// The trick is in using the 'Parse' function of DateTime and Timespan.
set { _when = DateTime.Parse(value); }
}

Now even partial seconds will work.