Creating Entities with dates in MS CRM 2011

MS CRM stores date values internally in UTC date format, so when I was programmatically creating appointments earlier this week I was getting weird date issues.

The solution is really simple



I figured out the following method for setting the dates in the entities. Basically you grab the difference between the current local DateTime, and the current UTC DateTime like this:

Code Snippet

261. TimeSpan utcOffset = DateTime.Now - DateTime.UtcNow;

Then when you create the entity just add the utcOffset to any date values.

Code Snippet

260. //    figure out the offset between now and UTC time, so that we can store the dates as UTC dates.
261. TimeSpan utcOffset = DateTime.Now - DateTime.UtcNow;
262.  
263. Appointment apt = new Appointment()
264. {
265.     dwe_AppointmentType = appointmentType,
266.     Subject = account.Name,
267.     IsAllDayEvent = true,
268.     ScheduledStart = aptDate + utcOffset,
269.     ScheduledEnd = aptDate.AddDays(1) + utcOffset,
270.     dwe_country = account.dwe_CountryId,
271.     RegardingObjectId = new EntityReference()
272.         {    
273.             Id = account.AccountId,
274.             LogicalName = "account"
275.         },
276.     OwnerId = account.OwnerId,
277. };

and it's as simple as that.