How would I configure PetaPoco to create DateTimes with type DateTimeKind.Unspecified instead of UTC?

Question

I'm migrating a Subsonic project over to PetaPoco. When Subsonic pulls DateTime columns from the database, it's returning DateTime as DateTimeKind.Unspecified. When PetaPoco hydrates a POCO, it's setting DateTimes as UTC.

TopTen Software's website actually has a blog post mentioning this exact issue: http://www.toptensoftware.com/Articles/84/PetaPoco-Value-Conversions-and-UTC-Times

But there is an annotation stating the solution outlined is obsolete, and links to another article mentioning mappers. I can't figure out how to add mappers to my solution to resolve this issue.

Answer 1

If you add this attribute to your POCO Object's DateTime Properties it will set the DateTimeKind to UTC for you (It doesn't do any conversions though).

[Column(ForceToUtc=true)]

Had to dig through the source to find this

To do the actual conversion to UTC, I modified PetaPoco:

PetaPoco.cs - Ln 3738

Change This:

return delegate(object src) { return new DateTime(((DateTime)src).Ticks, DateTimeKind.Utc); };

To This:

return delegate(object src) { return new DateTime(((DateTime)src).ToUniversalTime().Ticks, DateTimeKind.Utc); };

Just realized you were asking the opposite. I had to make these changes to get it to return proper UTC dates. You can modify PetaPoco to do the opposite with this code:

return delegate(object src) { return new DateTime(((DateTime)src).Ticks, DateTimeKind.Unspecified); };