Passing a DateTime to controller via URL causing error in ASP .NET MVC 3 (culture)

Question

My application is setted with pt-BR culture (Date is dd-mm-yyyy) in web.config:

<globalization enableClientBasedCulture="false" requestEncoding="utf-8" responseEncoding="utf-8" fileEncoding="iso-8859-15" responseHeaderEncoding="utf-8" resourceProviderFactoryType="string" enableBestFitResponseEncoding="true" culture="pt-BR" uiCulture="pt-BR" />

All DateTime created on my system is in right format, but I created a controller method like that:

public ActionResult Test(DateTime date)
{
}

Calling that method direct in the browser is passing null when the date is with portuguese-br format, like that:

mysite/Test/?date=19/01/2012   => date = null in my controller

mysite/Test/?date=01/01/2012   => date is fine, but in US format (mm-dd-yyyy)

How can I fix that, to accept my date format?

Answer 1

There's a gotcha with the default model binder that is not easy to know about but once you know it you no longer make the same mistake:

• When you use a POST request, the default model binder uses your culture settings to parse the dates.

• When you use a GET request, the default model binder uses CultureInfo.InvariantCulture to parse the dates and ignores your current culture settings.

Since you are using a GET request and passing the date as a query string parameter, you should format it using the invariant culture format when sending it in the url. The correct way to format your date as a query string parameter is yyyy-MM-dd.

You may take a look at the following blog post which gets into more details.