If you're working on a lot of custom integrations, you are bound to
eventually see dates and datetimes that are represented like this:
"\/Date(1198908717056)\/". These dates show up in JSON as strings, and
their numeric value represent milliseconds since January 1st 1970 UTC. I
believe that this is a Microsoft standard mostly used by .net to represent epoch time.
Here's a quick and useful method that parses these ".net type" datetimes into salesforce datetimes. Simply parse out the numeric value using the parenthesis as guides, cast as long, and use the very useful datetime method newInstance() to calculate the actual date.
Here's a quick and useful method that parses these ".net type" datetimes into salesforce datetimes. Simply parse out the numeric value using the parenthesis as guides, cast as long, and use the very useful datetime method newInstance() to calculate the actual date.