NodaTime | better date-time library | Data Labeling library

The NodaTime plugin doesn't support passing parameterized time zones from .NET; you can only use a constant expression such as DateTimeZoneProviders.Tzdb["Europe/Berlin"] (see these docs for supported translations). You can use this to convert a PG timestamp with time zone into a timestamp without time zone in PG, and then retrieve the result as a timestamp without time zone, which can be read as a NodaTime LocalDateTime.

However, if what you're looking for is to get a ZonedDateTime/LocalDateTime with the time zone of the client machine (where .NET is executing), then doing .InUtc().LocalDateTime is the way to do that - any reason you're trying to avoid it?

A bit more context (as well as a full code sample) could shed some more light on what you're trying to achieve.

The GeoTimeZone NuGet package can provide a lookup by lat/long to IANA ID, and then you can use DateTimeZoneProviders.Tzdb[id] to get the DateTimeZone from that. See the project home page for more details.

Within Noda Time itself, you can use TzdbDateTimeZoneSource.Default (or one that you've loaded) and then the ZoneLocations or Zone1970Locations properties to find zones for specific ISO-3166 countries... but they doesn't go below the "country" level (although they do have exemplar lat/long values). They're based on zone.tab and zone1970.tab - so any information not in that file isn't present in Noda Time either.

It sounds like GeoTimeZone is probably your best option here.

Most likely the issue is that the docker image for the dashboard is not compatible with the workflow server hosted by your application.

The cause of this mismatch is that the blog post references Elsa 2.3 NuGet packages, while the dashboard docker image is built from the latest source code in the master branch (which is something that should be fixed to avoid confusion like you're experiencing).

To make the dashboard work (which is built against latest source code), you need to update your workflow server app to reference the latest Elsa preview packages from MyGet (which are also built against latest source code from the master branch).

The following documentation describes how to reference the MyGet feed: https://elsa-workflows.github.io/elsa-core/docs/next/installation/installing-feeds#myget

I've found the answer on MassTransit discord. In addition to configuring serializer it is necessary to configure deserializer as well:

Support for mapping NodaTime Duration to PostgreSQL interval was only added in version 5 of the provider, you'll have to upgrade in order to use it. Note that the upcoming version 6 (to be released in a couple weeks) substantially improves NodaTime support in various ways - I'd recommend waiting and switching to that.

I haven't worked with System.CommandLine much, and there's not much documentation around custom parsing, but I believe what you want is a ParseArgument. Fortunately it's fairly easy to write that an extension method on the NodaTime IPattern to create an instance of that.

Here's a not-very-thoroughly-tested extension method:

The above works for me as-is using 5.0.10, without a value converter:

I would suggest using a datetimeoffset and a separate time zone ID. I'm assuming datetimeoffset still allows you to perform a total ordering (i.e. by instant) - although I suppose it's possible that that is less efficient than if you've stored a datetime2. It also may well take more space in the database, given that it's storing more data.

Even if the database is read by a service that does have time zone conversion operations, storing the offset in the database allows you to perform queries over the data based on the local date, e.g. "Show me all my appointments on Tuesday". You can't perform that query purely database-side if you only have instants.

One other thing you might want to consider if you're storing future date/time values is that the predicated time zone offset may change due to changes in rules. If your original input data was as a local date/time (which is usually the case if you're working with ZonedDateTime) then the datetimeoffset approach is storing "what the user gave you" plus the inferred offset - you can easily then update all the data with a later version of the time zone database if necessary. If you only have the computed instant, you'd need to work out what the original local date/time was in the "old" time zone database before adjusting it to the "new" time zone database. That may also have lost information, e.g. if the input value used to be ambiguous (so you picked one offset or the other) but no longer is.

Any ideas what I am doing wrong?

You're using ZonedDateTimePattern.GeneralFormatOnlyIso, which is (as the name suggests) only for formatting, not for parsing.

To get a pattern which is able to parse time zones, you need to specify an IDateTimeZoneProvider. The easiest way to do that is to start with a format-only pattern, and use WithZoneProvider: