ASP.NET MVC. Multilingual site. Set invariant culture for all DateTime's despite user's culture

Question

I develop multilingual site. Users can change preferred language, so i set current culture for each request like so:

System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = /* user preferred culture */
System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture = /* user preferred culture */

My domain entities have property DateAdded (to set the date the record was created):

public class EntityBase
{
    protected EntityBase()
    {
        DateAdded = DateTime.UtcNow;
    }

    [Required]
    public int Id { get; set; }

    public DateTime DateAdded { get; set; }

}

My question is: how can i interact globally with all DateTime's in my WebApplication with Invariant Culture despite user's culture? I want to save DateTime's in database (im using Entity Framework), update them, calculate them, parse strings in invariant culture etc. I'll show DateTime in user's culture where it's needed only.

Answer 1

Well, my biggest problem was i set CurrentCulture too late. I set it in controller's OnActionExecuting method like so:

public abstract class BaseController : Controller
{
    protected override void OnActionExecuting(ActionExecutingContext filterContext)
    {
        var culture = GetUserCultureSomehow();
        var cultureInfo = new System.Globalization.CultureInfo(culture);
        System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture = cultureInfo;
        System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = cultureInfo;
        base.OnActionExecuting(filterContext);
    }
}

But it is too late in some scenarios, i.e. ModelBinder binds data from POST request before any action is called.

I moved this logic up the request pipeline, i.e.:

protected void Application_PostAcquireRequestState(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
        //set culture here;
    }

This ensures culture is set as soon as possible for every request. After this i have no problems with converting strings to DateTime.