How to set time to midnight for current day?

c# .net

Every time that I create a non-nullable datetime in my mvc3 application it defaults to now(), where now is current date with current time. I would like to default it to today's date with 12am as the time.

I'm trying to default the time in my mvc...but...the following isn't setting to todays date @12am. Instead it defaults to now with current date and time.

private DateTime _Begin = new DateTime(DateTime.Now.Year, DateTime.Now.Month, DateTime.Now.Day, 12, 0, 0);
public DateTime Begin { get { return _Begin; } set { _Begin = value; } }

How can I set to 12am for the current date for non-nullable datetime?

Solution 1:

You can use the Date property of the DateTime object - eg

DateTime midnight = DateTime.Now.Date;

So your code example becomes

private DateTime _Begin = DateTime.Now.Date;
public DateTime Begin { get { return _Begin; } set { _Begin = value; } }

PS. going back to your original code setting the hours to 12 will give you time of noon for the current day, so instead you could have used 0...

var now = DateTime.Now;
new DateTime(now.Year, now.Month, now.Day, 0, 0, 0);

Solution 2:

I believe you are looking for DateTime.Today. The documentation states:

An object that is set to today's date, with the time component set to 00:00:00.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.datetime.today.aspx

Your code would be

DateTime _Begin = DateTime.Today;

Solution 3:

Using some of the above recommendations, the following function and code is working for search a date range:

Set date with the time component set to 00:00:00

public static DateTime GetDateZeroTime(DateTime date)
{
    return new DateTime(date.Year, date.Month, date.Day, 0, 0, 0);
}

Usage

var modifieddatebegin = Tools.Utilities.GetDateZeroTime(form.modifieddatebegin);

var modifieddateend = Tools.Utilities.GetDateZeroTime(form.modifieddateend.AddDays(1));

Solution 4:

Only need to set it to

DateTime.Now.Date

Console.WriteLine(DateTime.Now.Date.ToString("yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss"));
Console.Read();

It shows

"2017-04-08 00:00:00"

on my machine.

Solution 5:

Related, so I thought I would post for others. If you want to find the UTC of the start of today (for your timezone) the following code works for any UTC offset (-23.5 thru +23.5). This looks like we add X hours then subtract X hours, but the important thing is the ".Date" after the add.

double utcOffset= 10.0;  // Set to your UTC offset in hours (eg. Melbourne Australia)
var now = DateTime.UtcNow;

var startOfToday = now.AddHours(utcOffset - 24.0).Date;
startOfToday = startOfToday.AddHours(24.0 - utcOffset);