Range query on Date value in DocumentDB

Question

According to this article, it's best to convert Date into Epoch time in order to use it is range query in DocumentDB. However, as recently the range query on Sting values has been added to DocumentDB, it is necessary to do convert date-time to epoch (as long as all date-time values have the same format and are in UTC format)?

Answer 1

This is similar to this question, where the accepted answer suggests using strings as you point out.

But to answer your question more specifically, DocumentDB cannot store JavaScript Date objects because it only stores pure JSON and Date is not a part of the JSON spec. So, you (or your client API) needs to do something with Date objects. By default, the node.js and .NET clients will convert Date objects to ISO-8601 formatted strings so using strings is actually a bit easier than Epoch. Just send the Date object to the database. The one trick to keep in mind here is that it's not converted back into a Date object when you read it. It comes back as a string. You have to do the conversion yourself. In JavaScript, this is easy. Just call new Date(yourDateString). Not sure about .NET or the other platforms.