Dealing with Null DateTime returned by JSON

Working on the Spektrix API integration for Hull Truck Theatre highlighted an issue with JSON data when the receiving model required a DateTime field.

 

The API unit tests showed a fail when trying to convert Null to a DateTime property.

 

My first approach was to make the properties nullable - DateTime?, however this created problems down the line in consumption of the value as the consuming code was not expecting a nullable field value.

 

The answer came closer to the API receiving layer - at the point where the JSON is deserialized. At this level we can either create a global approach to handling null values OR we can decorate the model properties individually to ignore null values as appropriate. I chose the latter approach and decorated the model properties required with the following attribute.

 

    [JsonProperty(NullValueHandling = NullValueHandling.Ignore)]
    public DateTime MyDateField { get; set; }

 

And for reference - the global settings approach

 

    var customJsonSerializerSettings = new JsonSerializerSettings
    {
         NullValueHandling = NullValueHandling.Ignore
    };
                    
    var myObjectJsonModel = JsonConvert.DeserializeObject(jsonString, customJsonSerializerSettings);

 

Where the consuming code then tries to read MyDateField if presents as a DateTime.MinValue and so all the consuming code still performs as expected in my case.

 

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