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LINQ query not statisfying the datetime validation

This is my LINQ for returning the matching record
var staffawards = await _context.StaffAwards.FirstOrDefaultAsync(c => c.StaffID == StaffAwards.StaffID && c.EmpID == StaffAwards.EmpID && c.AwardDate == StaffAwards.AwardDate);
The StaffAwards.AwardDate will be in this format "09/12/2020 12:00:00 AM"
whereas the AwardDate in my table will be like this "2020-12-09 17:16:00.000"
How can i convert the StaffAwards.AwardDate in Sql Server datetime?
AnyHelp would be appreciated.

If your code and your database use Date/DateTime types as they should be, and not strings then you need to understand a few things:
date datatypes don't have a format, only strings created from dates have a format. Whatever format you see in your code/sql query tool is the formatting it has applied when it showed you the date (it had to turn it to a string to display it)
a datetime with a time of midnight is a completely different datetime to one where the time is 17:16, just like a number 1.0 is a completely different number to 1.75352; you will never get a database to return you a record with a time of midnight if you use equals and pass a time of anything other than midnight, just like you will never succeed in getting a record where the age of the person is 1.0 by asking "where age = 1.75352"
Either fix up your parameter so it is midnight, like the db is, or use a parameter range (if the dates in the db will have times other than also)
//if the db date is always midnight
.Where(x => x.DateColumnInDb == datetimeParameter.Date);
//if the db might have times too
.Where(x => x.DateColumnInDb >= datetimeParameter.Date && x.DateColumnInDb < datetimeParameter.Date.AddDays(1));
By using a range, we do not risk asking the database to convert every datetime in the table, every time we want to query. Converting data in a where clause is typically a bad idea because it usually leads to significant performance loss because indexes cannot be used
Also, make sure your .net side datetime and your db time use the same timezone or they will actually be referring to different times

To use a Date with the Database-Format you can use the DbFunctions.
Like this:
var staffawards = await _context.StaffAwards.FirstOrDefaultAsync(c => c.StaffID == StaffAwards.StaffID && c.EmpID == StaffAwards.EmpID && DbFunctions.TruncateTime(DateTime.Parse(c.AwardDate)) == StaffAwards.AwardDate);
Important: For TruncateTime, you have to use a DateTime. You have to convert c.AwardDate to DateTime. DateTime.Parse(c.AwardDate)

Most likely, you have the SQL server installed on a separate machine, which may be due to a different date format.
But there is no need for this conversion, the entity framework will do it automatically for you.
If you just compare date, you can use this code :
var staffawards = await _context.StaffAwards.FirstOrDefaultAsync(c => c.StaffID == StaffAwards.StaffID && c.EmpID == StaffAwards.EmpID && c.AwardDate.Date == StaffAwards.AwardDate.Date);

Group by using the Entity Framework

I receive 48 files per day on a half hourly basis from market. These files have a start time as a property. I am using Entity Framework to view these files in a web application and as the files have a UK time but I am working with a european market the trading day begins the day before at 11pm and so I want to group these together based on the trading day.
In SQL I can accomplish this by:
select cast(DATEADD(hour, 1, START_TIME) as date), count(cast(START_TIME as date))
from imbalancecost
group by cast(DATEADD(hour, 1, START_TIME) as date)
I am trying to achieve a similar result in C# using the following attempt:
IEnumerable<IGrouping<DateTime, ImbalanceCost> imbalanceCost = db.ImbalanceCost.GroupBy(ic => ic.START_TIME).ToArray();
Is there any means of first adding the hour onto my grouping and then using only the date part of this new calculated value?

Is there any means of first adding the hour onto my grouping and then using only the date part of this new calculated value?
In LINQ to Entities (EF6) it's a matter of using respectively the canonical functions DbFunctions.AddHours and DbFunctions.TruncateTime:
db.ImbalanceCost.GroupBy(ic =>
DbFunctions.TruncateTime(DbFunctions.AddHours(ic.START_TIME, 1)).Value)
Note that .Value (or cast to DateTime) is to make the result DateTime rather than DateTime? returned by the canonical method in case ic.START_TIME is not nullable, hence you know the result is not nullable as well.

If I understand you correctly, you want to add an hour to the start time and group by the date part. That can be done as follows:
var imbalanceCost = db.ImbalanceCost
.Select(x => EntityFunctions.AddHours(x.START_TIME, 1))
.GroupBy(ic => ic.Value.Date)
.ToArray();

LINQ query maps dates incorrectly

My query looks like so:
using (var ctx = new PCLvsCompContext())
{
var brokerId = broker?.Id;
var symbolId = company?.Id;
var result = (from t in ctx.TradeHistoryJoineds
where t.TradeDate >= fromDate
&& t.TradeDate <= toDate
&& (brokerId == null || t.BrokerId == brokerId)
&& (symbolId == null || t.SymbolId == symbolId)
select t).OrderBy(x => x.TradeDate).ThenBy(x => x.BrokerName).ToList();
return result;
}
As an example, I run this query with dates like fromDate March-01-2017 toDate March-31-2017. I then captured the generated sql in SQL profiler that this query produces and ran it in SQL management studio. The output was as expected where for each weekday, each company has some trades. The query is based off of a view which casts all dates to "datetime" so that excel can parse them as dates correctly. However, when I put a breakpoint at "return result" and inspect the dates, all but 2 of the dates are March-1-2017. This is incorrect, the query result in SQL manager shows trades for almost every weekday in March (which is correct).
What is going on here? Why is Linq losing its mind?

Although based on the results I cannot see exactly how you would end up with those results, it is very common that you could be dealing with a DateTime timezone issue. I suspect that perhaps you saved your dates to the database using a DateTime object from say DateTime.Now instead of DateTime.UtcNow. So at that point in time and based on the machine it was called on it would be based on the timezone and datelight savings of that machine.
A DateTime object should not be used as it can relate to the region of the SQL database, the region of the server making this LINQ call and so the two regions could be on different timezones.
Instead you should always use DateTimeOffset.
If you cannot do that for some reason, then double-check your dates toDate and fromDate and do:
var utcToDate = toDate.ToUniversalTime().ToString("yyyy'-'MM'-'dd'T'HH':'mm':'ss'.'fff'Z'");
var utcFromDate = toDate.ToUniversalTime().ToString("yyyy'-'MM'-'dd'T'HH':'mm':'ss'.'fff'Z'");
Which gives something like this if it was run on 3rd April 2018 at 22:56.
2018-04-03T22:56:57.740Z
You would then also need to make sure when you save any date to the SQL backing store that you do ToUniversalTime() firstly. You can check your SQL tables directly with a normal SQL query and they should be stored in the database as the same UTC string format as above, and then the comparison should be obvious to whether it is valid.
However I would strongly recommend changing all your DateTime calls and gets to DateTimeOffset. The only time to use DateTime in majority of cases is for the final display to a user.

Thank you all for your suggestions. For those who are familiar with linq, EF and views this may seem like a stupid oversight, but I will post my shame for others in case this happens to them since the cause and the resulting behavior are not immediately obviously linked (as can be seen by all the suggestions, none of which actually point to the answer).
When you are querying a view using linq and Entity Framework, you apparently must have a column called 'Id', otherwise Entity Framework can't distinguish any of the rows from one another and simply makes some sort of duplication that I can't quite decipher (all the rows were unique based on their data even without an Id column, so I can't quite figure out why this is necessary).
So by adding an the TradeId with an 'Id' alias to the view, then Entity Framework seemed to return to sanity and map the data as expected.

Convert a datetime in a subcollection of collection and use it in LINQ to SQL

I have a collection with subcollections in it, one of which is a date field stored in the DB as a string in the format yyyymmdd (which also contains a few random things such as "E" or 20085, etc.). This date is also part of one of the subcollections in the collection. This date field will now be used for searching, so I need to make it into a real date to use it in LINQ statements.
I since learned that LINQ to SQL doesn't support statements that it cannot translate into SQL, so I can't insert a function that returns a properly converted date and I haven't yet found a standard convert function that will transform the string into a valid date object.
I also tried layered converting, though this smelled bad, such as this:
search = from c in search
where c.Object.Any(p=> new DateTime(Convert.ToInt32(p.theDate, Substring(0,4))))... etc.
I just received conversion errors no matter what I did here.
My basic question is: does LINQ to SQL support anything inline for such a conversion? Another option is to change the datamodel or make a view, but I'd rather see if there are ways to handle this in code first. What I'm trying to do is something like the following:
search = from c in search
where c.subcollection.Any(p=>p.theDate >= min) && c.subcollection.Any(p=>p.theDate <= max)
select c;
Where min and max are passed in date values.
Thank you!

The SqlMethods class has some static helper methods that are translatable by LINQ to SQL. Most of these have to do with DateTime comparison. I'm not sure exactly which method you are looking for, but you should be able to find what you want at the documentation page for System.Data.Linq.SqlClient.SqlMethods
Alternatively, you could create a user-defined function and handle the conversion and comparison issue on the SQL side. The integration doesn't require much more than decorating the corresponding Object Model method with a FunctionAttribute, (which indicates how LINQ-to-SQL should process the method. Here is some documentation on this process:
How to: Call User-Defined Functions Inline
User-Defined Functions

If you wish to compare a date using LINQ but the SQL date column is a string value, use .CompareTo("2002-01-01") >= 0
This will translate and return any dates that match 2002-01-01 or occured later in time. Not sure how this works in with your subcollection but as an example:
search = from c in search
where c.stringDateColumn.CompareTo("2002-01-01") >= 0
select c;
Edit: I did some tests on a table with dates in strings like "2002-09-04E", "2004-04-01 34", "20050604e" and "2005-06-01444" and the results do return based on a string in format yyyy-mm-dd or yyyymmdd:
search = from c in search
where c.subcollection.Any(p=>p.theDate.CompareTo(min) >= 0) && c.subcollection.Any(p=>p.theDate.CompareTo(max) <= 0)
select c;

How to compare a string column(as DateTime) in LINQ?

I have a database with a ValidDate field - it's a string(we made a mistake, it should be a datetime, but we can't modify the database now.)
and now I want to compare this filed with a parameter(validDateStart) from the website:
priceList = priceList.Where(p => Convert.ToDateTime(p.ValidDate) >= Convert.ToDateTime(validDateStart));
var list = initPriceList.ToList();
But I get an error: The method ToDateTime is not implemented.
Can anybody give me some help? Thanks!

This is not supported in Linq to Entities (nor Linq to SQL to my knowledge). Remember that your query is executed on the database - where there is simply no equivalent for Convert.ToDateTime.
Any string parsing in your query would really just be a workaround - as a real solution make those columns not strings but datetime in the database and you would not have this problem in the first place.
A hacky workaround would be materializing all rows (you can use AsEnumerable() for that), then doing the parsing - this will have bad performance though but might work good enough if there are few rows:
var startDate = DateTime.Parse(validDateStart);
var list = priceList.AsEnumerable()
.Where(p => DateTime.Parse(p.ValidDate) >= startDate);
.ToList();
Edit:
With your example update it looks like you can just do string comparisons to do what you wanted - granted it's still a hack but would perform much better than materializing all rows. This is possible because your date format puts the most significant numbers first, then the less significant parts - it's year, then month, then day (should this not be the case and the day comes before the month in your example this solution will not work).
Assuming your input string validDateStart is in the same format as well you can just do:
var list = priceList.Where(p => p.ValidDate.CompareTo(validDateStart) >=0);
.ToList();
string comparison with String.CompareTo seems to be support both in Linq to Sql as well as Linq to Entities.

If all the records in your database always start with year, month and day (for example: the date format is yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss or yyyy/MM/dd or yyyyMMdd) no matter if it has separators or not. The thing is that the values should has a format where it starts with year, month and day.
You can do the following:
1: Convert your filter value (website) to the same format as you have in your database:
// DateTime format in database: yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss:ffffff
var from = filtro.CreationDateFrom?.ToString("yyyy-MM-dd");
var to = filtro.CreationDateTo?.AddDays(1).ToString("yyyy-MM-dd");
2: And write your query like this (using CompareTo method):
var query = (from x in ctx.TskTaskQueues
where x.CreationDatetime.CompareTo(from) >= 0
&& x.CreationDatetime.CompareTo(to) <= 0
select x);
It worked for me!
I'm not using LinqToEntities but I'm using LinqConnect (for Oracle) that is similar to LinqEntities.
If you use a format like this dd-MM-yyyy, it probably will not work.