If you need to Convert SQL 2005 DB TimeStamp values to Long then follow these steps:
1. Retrieve the DB TimeStamp value in a Byte Array (8 bytes long).
2. Convert the byte array into a Hexadecimal string
3. Convert the hexadecimal string to a long
private long BytesToLong(byte[] bytes)
{
string ts = null;
foreach (byte b in bytes)
ts += b.ToString("X").PadLeft(2,Convert.ToChar("0"));
return Convert.ToInt64(ts, 16);
}
There is another method to convert the DBTimeStamp to Long, but I dont prefer this method since it can return negative values. The method is:
1. Retrieve the DB TimeStamp value in a Byte Array (8 bytes long). 2. Use BitConverter class to convert the byte array into long
long result = BitConverter.ToInt64(dbTimestamp, 0);
Inorder to remedy this use the following to generate the same long value as in step 1:
public static long FromDbTimestamp(byte[] dbTimestamp)
{
long result = 0;
if (dbTimestamp != null)
{
Array.Reverse(dbTimestamp);
result = BitConverter.ToInt64(dbTimestamp, 0);
}
return result;
}
Finally to convert a long into the correct DBTimeStamp use this:
public static byte[] ToDbTimestamp(long timestamp)
{
byte[] result = BitConverter.GetBytes(timestamp);
Array.Reverse(result);
return result;
}