MVC Controller receives DateTime parsed as different culture from CurrentThread.CurrentCulture

Question

I have an ajax call sending data from a datepicker as a short date to my controller's method. Inside my controller I want to use the date to filter entries in a table, and return the whole thing along with the date.

My app's culture is french (fr-FR)

Let's use June 12th 2015 for our examples.

I encountered several problems:

The jQuery datepicker is defaulted to have dateFormat: "DD d MM yy", so when I pick June 12th in the date picker, the field shows "vendredi 12 juin 2015" and the JS sends "vendredi+12+juin+2015" as my DateTime field, which yields null inside the controller's method.

I decided to fix that by re-specifying the dateFormat to be "dd/mm/yy" which takes less screen space anyway.
Now, when I pick june 12th, the fields holds (and the JS sends) "12/06/2015" which yields {06/12/2015 00:00:00} in the controller's method with 12 as the month and 06 as the day. I checked my System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture to see it is {fr-FR}, so I don't understand why "12/06/2015" is parsed as December 6th.

I implemented IAuthorizationFilter in my controller to see in OnAuthorization what were the CurrentThread's culture:
Both CurrentCulture and CurrentUICulture are {fr-FR}

I tried turning it around, and set the date picker format to mm/dd/yyyy which (in)correctly translates June 12th to "06/12/2015" which yields {12/06/2015 00:00:00} in the controller's method. This could work but then when my date is reinserted into the page, it's "12/06/2015" which is correct but interpreted by datepicker as December 12th because of the date format.

I also tried sending the value with $('#date').datepicker({ dateFormat: "mm/dd/yy "}).val() and leave the datepicker format on the first call as "dd/mm/yy", but this still gives me the value formatted as "dd/mm/yy"

I had to parse and then format the date like this:

$.datepicker.formatDate("mm/dd/yy", $.datepicker.parseDate("dd/mm/yy", $('#date').val()))

In order to "reverse" the month and the day to trick the server into parsing it as June 12th.

Additionnal info: I have no <globalization ...> in my Web.config nor do I have any custom model binder.

I could maybe try to have a SSCCE if you need it but it looks like it's hard to shrink down...

TL;DR: I have CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = {fr-FR} displayed when I break on the first line inside my controller's method, yet my DateTime sent as "12/06/2015" (June 12th) in the request is parsed as "06/12/2015" (December 6th) before being passed to my controller's method.

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Why does my CurrentCulture does not seem to be taken into account when the server is parsing the date?

Answer 1

Try to make sure your culture is set before the model binding occurs. If you check your System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture setting inside your controllers action than it's posiible that this was set after the date was parsed by your model binder.

You can check this by implementing IAuthorizationFilter.