Dates

When returning a date, you should always use the DateLiteral format and preferably the Iso8601Literal. If you do need to send back a date in a format other than Iso8601Literal, then you can use a StructuredDateLiteral format, which allows you to specify the kind as part of the returned entity.

The informal Iso8601Literal format is the simplest method to use and should be understandable by almost any client consuming your API:

{"date": "2016-07-14T16:00Z"} 

The more formal StucturedDateLiteral does not return a string, but an entity that contains two properties, kind and value:

{"date": {"kind": "U", "value": 1471186826}} 

The permissible kinds are:

• C: CLR; number of milliseconds since midnight January 1 00
• E: ECMAScript; number of milliseconds since midnight, January 1, 1970
• I: ISO 8601; a string limited to the ECMAScript subset
• O: OLE Date; integral part is the number of days since midnight, December 31, 1899, and fractional part is the time within the day (0.5 = midday)
• T: Ticks; number of ticks (100-nanosecond intervals) since midnight January 1, 1601
• U: UNIX; number of seconds since midnight, January 1, 1970
• W: Windows; number of milliseconds since midnight January 1, 1601
• X: Excel; as for O, but the year 1900 is incorrectly treated as a leap year, and day 0 is "January 0 (zero)"