Data: When saving to server, Date attribute loses time zone information

[rykov]

A Date object is always sent as a GMT string, which loses the Date's time zone information

[rykov]

Here's an attempt to do an ISO 8601 with Timezone

var toTransform = function(d) {
  if(d instanceof Date) {
    var utc = new Date(d - d.getTimezoneOffset() * 60000);
    var zone = d.toTimeString().match(/GMT([0-9:\-\+]+)/)[1];
    return utc.toISOString().replace(/Z$/, zone);
  } else {
    return null;
  }
};

[sly7-7]

Is it related to #386 #387 ?

[leepfrog]

@sly7-7 @rykov i believe the PR i put in will fix this w/ the default transforms

[rykov]

Can you point me to the code to which you're referring? I'm having trouble finding changes to the existing algorithm that converts to RFC 3339 format of UTC time.

[rickard2]

I can confirm this, if it's not a bug it's at least unexpected behavior:

test('Date attributes serializes as Date toString()', function() {

    App.Foo = DS.Model.extend({
        foo: DS.attr('date')
    });

    var date = new Date();
    var record = App.Foo.createRecord({foo:date});
    var serialized = record.serialize();

    equal(serialized.foo, date.toString());
});

Expected:       "Fri Feb 08 2013 13:28:58 GMT+0100 (CET)"
Result:         "Fri, 08 Feb 2013 12:28:58 GMT"

[rickard2]

I'm already using the momentjs library so I created a new transform using that:

DS.JSONTransforms.moment = {
    deserialize:function (serialized) {
        if (serialized) {
            return moment(serialized).toDate();
        }

        return null;
    },

    serialize:function (date) {
        if (date) {
            var m = moment(date);

            if (m && m.isValid()) {
                return m.format(App.API_DATETIME_FORMAT);
            }
        }

        return null;
    }
};

I'm not sure this approach is fool proof but it seems to solve my immediate problem at least.

Edit: Updated with slightly safer version

[maenu]

Just observed this issue. Why not just use the epoch timestamp with Date.getTime() and new Date(timestamp) as serialization and deserialization? This is much easier than messing around with Strings.

[rykov]

Epoch timestamp loses time-zone information, which I need in my case.

[wagenet]

If someone wants to submit a PR for this, we can definitely consider it. For now, you can just overwrite the default date transform to handle your specific case.