The Standard DICOM DateTime Format

The standard DateTime format (YYYYMMDD) is explained in Table 6.2-1 of Part 5 of the DICOM standard.

What Format DicomObjects Accepts

Simple Dates

DicomObjects takes String format as well as DateTime format and turns whatever dates it is given into DICOM dates, according to the Regional Settings of the machine DicomObjects is running on, so on a European machine the value “04/03/2007” will be 20070304 in DICOM format and on a US machine it will produce 20070403.

Date Ranges

A date range, as used in a query must be explicitly formatted into DICOM form by the surrounding program, using of these forms:

• YYYYMMDD-
• -YYYYMMDD
• YYYYMMDD-YYYYMMDD

If these ranges formats are using, then in the .NET version of DicomObjects you must explicitly set the ValidationType property of the dataset to “ForQuery” to avoid validation errors, as these range formats are not suitable for use in other DICOM DataSets.