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c#datetime
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Reputation: 1348

Is there a more efficient way to flatten Date parts of a DateTime object than creating a new DateTime instance?

I have a series of datetimes of which I need to flatten the Date potion and only keep time values.

Note: The reason behind to do such a weird thing is that we use a third party component that uses Date Part to make certain decisions. Also, I found a different way to get around it but I am still curious if there's a more efficient way to achieve this.

The only way I could think is create new DateTime objects with the same date but with times from individual source DT objects.

This is a simple example of the approach that I don't like at all.

    DateTime flattenDts(DateTime input)
    {
        return new DateTime(1, 1, 1, input.Hour, input.Minute, input.Second);
    }

as you can see, this doesn't look very good at all. specially when there are hundreds of datetime values.

Is there a more efficient way to achieve this?

Edit: Please note that I cannot use timespan as the third party lib. will only take DateTime parameters.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 401

Answers (3)

Ivan Stoev
Ivan Stoev

Reputation: 205769

I think a little bit more efficient would be to use the construct

new DateTime(input.TimeOfDay.Ticks)

For easy usage (and also changing the implementation if needed), put that inside an extension method as @Matthew Watson suggested. I would call it TruncateDate, but that's not essential.

Upvotes: 1

Matthew Watson
Matthew Watson

Reputation: 109792

There's no more efficient way to do this, but you could reduce the amount of typing you need to do by writing an extension method to do it:

public static class DateTimeExt
{
    public static DateTime Flatten(this DateTime self)
    {
        return new DateTime(1, 1, 1, self.Hour, self.Minute, self.Second);
    }
}

Then code to flatten the date would look like this:

DateTime test = DateTime.Now;

var flattened = test.Flatten();

It's not much, but perhaps it will help a little.

Upvotes: 5

Codor
Codor

Reputation: 17605

According to the documentation of DateTime, the properties are read-only. This means that basically DateTime is immutable; if a modification of the contents is desired, this is only possible with a new object. In short, there is no solution which is more efficient.

Upvotes: 1

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