How do I pass a datetime value as a URI parameter in asp.net mvc?

I thought I'd share what works for me in MVC5 for anyone that comes looking for a similar answer.

My Controller Signature looks like this:

public ActionResult Index(DateTime? EventDate, DateTime? EventTime)
{

}

My ActionLink looks like this in Razor:

@Url.Action("Index", "Book", new { EventDate = apptTime, EventTime = apptTime})

This gives a URL like this:

Book?EventDate=01%2F20%2F2016%2014%3A15%3A00&EventTime=01%2F20%2F2016%2014%3A15%3A00

Which encodes the date and time as it should.

Use the ticks value. It's quite simple to rebuild into a DateTime structure

 Int64 nTicks = DateTime.Now.Ticks;
 ....
 DateTime dtTime = new DateTime(nTicks);

The colon in your first example's url is going to cause an error (Bad Request) so you can't do exactly what you are looking for. Other than that, using a DateTime as an action parameter is most definitely possible.

If you are using the default routing, this 3rd portion of your example url is going to pickup the DateTime value as the {id} parameter. So your Action method might look like this:

public ActionResult Index(DateTime? id)
{
    return View();
}

You'll probably want to use a Nullable Datetime as I have, so if this parameter isn't included it won't cause an exception. Of course, if you don't want it to be named "id" then add another route entry replacing {id} with your name of choice.

As long as the text in the url will parse to a valid DateTime value, this is all you have to do. Something like the following works fine and will be picked up in your Action method without any errors:

<%=Html.ActionLink("link", "Index", new { id = DateTime.Now.ToString("dd-MM-yyyy") }) %>

The catch, in this case of course, is that I did not include the time. I'm not sure there are any ways to format a (valid) date string with the time not represented with colons, so if you MUST include the time in the url, you may need to use your own format and parse the result back into a DateTime manually. Say we replace the colon with a "!" in the actionlink: new { id = DateTime.Now.ToString("dd-MM-yyyy HH!mm") }.

Your action method will fail to parse this as a date so the best bet in this case would probably to accept it as a string:

public ActionResult Index(string id)
{
    DateTime myDate;
    if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(id))
    {
        myDate = DateTime.Parse(id.Replace("!", ":"));
    }
    return View();
}

Edit: As noted in the comments, there are some other solutions arguably better than mine. When I originally wrote this answer I believe I was trying to preserve the essence of the date time format as best possible, but clearly URL encoding it would be a more proper way of handling this. +1 to Vlad's comment.

Try to use toISOString(). It returns string in ISO8601 format.

from javascript

$.get('/example/doGet?date=' + new Date().toISOString(), function (result) {
    console.log(result);
});

from c#

[HttpGet]
public JsonResult DoGet(DateTime date)
{
    return Json(date.ToString(), JsonRequestBehavior.AllowGet);
}