DateTime Class

Class that represents an RFC 2822 date-time.

For a list of all members of this type, see DateTime Members.

System.Object
   Node
      FieldBody
         DateTime

Remarks

DateTime represents an Internet date-time string as described in RFC 2822.

The parse operation for DateTime parses the string representation to extract the year, month, day, hour, minute, second, and time zone. DateTime provides methods to set or get the individual elements of the date-time.

The use of DateTime is best explained by considering the following use cases.

DateTime parses Internet date-time strings. When a MIME message is received, perhaps from a remote source, you may set the inherited String property, or use the DateTime constructor, to set the string representation of the DateTime object. Then call the Parse() method to parse the string representation. Finally, retrieve the properties Year, Month, and so on, to access the parsed elements of the date-time string.

DateTime generates Internet date-time strings. Use the default constructor to create a new DateTime object with a null date-time. Call one of the methods SetValuesLocal() or SetValuesLiteral() to set the year, month, day, hour, minute, second, and zone with the desired values. Alternatively, you can set the values for the date-time from a Posix scalar time, using the FromPosixTime() method. Then call the Assemble() method to create the string representation. Finally, retrieve the inherited String property to get the string representation.

DateTime converts to and from a scalar date and time. Call the FromPosixTime() method or the AsPosixTime() method to convert from or to a "Posix time," defined as the number of seconds elapsed since 1 Jan 1970 00:00:00 UTC. By converting to a scalar representation of the date and time, Hunny MIME.NET makes it easy for you to compare two different dates.

Note: It is possible that DateTime will encounter an error while parsing a date-time string. When this happens, throwing an exception is not a wise way to proceed, since in most cases higher level operations would also have to terminate before the library user's code could deal with the exception. What actually happens, is that DateTime "recovers" from the error by setting the date and time to 1 Jan 1970 00:00:00 UTC. To easily check whether a parse operation completed successfully, you can call AsPosixTime() and examine the return value. A value of zero indicates that the parsing operation failed; any other value indicates it succeeded.

Requirements

Namespace: Hunny.Mime

Assembly: Hunny.Mime (in Hunny.Mime.dll)

See Also

DateTime Members | Hunny.Mime Namespace