Special structs for Date and DateTime

[MEmanuelsson]

I raised this issue (schemaorg/schemaorg#2240) on the schemaorg github repo yesterday regarding how to handle Date which only consists of a year in the Schema.NET implementation of schemaorg. Following the comment from RichardWallis I believe it would be a good idea to create special structs to handle Date and DateTime in the schemas where these are applicable since DateTimeOffset (now being used) always contains a complete date and time. Any thoughts around this?

[RehanSaeed]

Interesting question. .NET doesn't have a good Date/Time classes and has never been good at representing dates without time. One approach I have taken is to use DateTimeOffset for dates with time and then DateTime for just dates (making sure that JSON serializes as just the date portion). That still wouldn't help with representing a year which I think we could represent as a single int number.

[RehanSaeed]

If you're passionate about date representation, I'll be willing to accept a PR for this work.

[MEmanuelsson]

Working on a pull request right now which you'll receive shortly. Focusing on Date and not DateTime, since they seem to be rendered correctly as far as I can tell.

[RehanSaeed]

Ok cool!

I think when we use DateTime, we should serialize it as a date without time portion using a JSON.NET attribute. See https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16320762/dates-without-time-in-asp-net-web-apis-json-output

[MEmanuelsson]

OK, not really sure about how that would be possible to use for "dates" that consist of only the year or the year and month as explained on schemaorg/schemaorg#2240?

[MEmanuelsson]

Pull request created #48

[RehanSaeed]

Thanks for this. Reviewed it. I think you are on the right track.

[RehanSaeed]

This is now fixed. Thanks again @MEmanuelsson!