How to Handle Dates and Times with Serde in Rust

Serde does not handle dates and times by default because chrono types do not implement Serde traits out of the box. You must enable the serde feature in the chrono crate and use #[derive(Serialize, Deserialize)] on your structs to automatically serialize and deserialize DateTime fields.

use chrono::{DateTime, Utc};
use serde::{Deserialize, Serialize};

#[derive(Serialize, Deserialize)]
struct Event {
    name: String,
    timestamp: DateTime<Utc>,
}

fn main() {
    let event = Event {
        name: "Launch".to_string(),
        timestamp: Utc::now(),
    };
    let json = serde_json::to_string(&event).unwrap();
    println!("{json}");
}

Serde is a tool that converts Rust data into formats like JSON, but it doesn't know how to handle dates by default. You need to tell the chrono library (which handles dates) to work with Serde by enabling a specific feature in your project settings. Once enabled, Serde automatically converts your date objects into text and back without extra code.