I say little-known, perhaps it is not but at least I struggled for a while to figure out how to do a really simple thing – change the format that dates are sent out via a JSON call. Typically a date will be sent in ISO string format eg “2015-01-19T10:30:33.732Z” which is not ideal for my very thin backend service to dump into a database – I usually use a unix timestamp. Rather than having to add a whole load of parsing code and figuring out which was meant to be a date field and which is just a normal string I really wanted any dates to automatically serialize to a unix timestamp (or javascript timestamp which is unixtime*1000). The solution?

// All Dates want to get sent as timestamps...
Date.prototype.toJSON = Date.prototype.getTime;

Thanks to Javascript’s great prototype concept (this must be a good day – usually it winds me up quite a bit!) this means that any date objects will now get serialized into the format that I wanted. To send them all as unix-times you can just do:

Date.prototype.toJSON = function() { return Math.floor( this.getTime() / 1000 ) }