👀 Views: 437 💬 Answers: 1 📅 Created: 2025-06-13

xml serialization datetime C#

I'm wondering if anyone has experience with I'm working on a personal project and I'm currently trying to serialize an object to XML using `XmlSerializer`, and I have a property of type `DateTime` that I want to format in a specific way ("yyyy-MM-dd")... However, when I attempt to serialize my object, the resulting XML does not respect my custom format. Instead, it outputs the default `DateTime` string format, which is causing issues when I try to deserialize it later. Here's what my class looks like: ```csharp public class MyData { [XmlElement(DataType = "date")] public DateTime MyDate { get; set; } } ``` When I serialize an instance of this class like this: ```csharp var myData = new MyData { MyDate = new DateTime(2023, 10, 12) }; var serializer = new XmlSerializer(typeof(MyData)); using (var writer = new StringWriter()) { serializer.Serialize(writer, myData); var output = writer.ToString(); Console.WriteLine(output); } ``` The output looks like this: ```xml <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16"?> <MyData xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"> <MyDate>2023-10-12T00:00:00</MyDate> </MyData> ``` As you can see, it's not in the format I wanted. I tried using the `XmlElement` attribute with a custom format, but that doesn't seem to affect the serialization. I also considered implementing `IXmlSerializable` to manually control the serialization process, but that seems overly complex for what I need. Is there a simpler way to achieve this formatting, or am I exploring with the default serialization format? Any insights or workarounds would be greatly appreciated!