Views and Snapshots

A ZView is a projection of an instant through a zone, calendar, and locale. Every ZDate exposes two: utc and local. Views are lazy — fields resolve on first read and are cached — and they are read-only: a view can never change the instant it projects.

Fields

Getter	Description
year, month, day, era	Calendar fields in the view's calendar
hour, minute, second, nanosecond	Clock fields in the view's zone
epoch	The projected instant's identity
zone	ZTimeZone for this view
calendar	ZCalendar for this view
locale	ZLocale for this view

Derived Fields

Getter	Description
leapYear	Calendar-aware leap year
daysInMonth / daysInYear	Calendar-aware lengths
dayOfWeek	ISO day 1–7
dayOfYear / weekOfYear / isoQuarter	Position within the year
firstDayOfWeek	Calendar's first weekday
monthName / monthAbbr	Localized month names
weekdayName / weekdayAbbr	Localized weekday names
dayPeriod	Localized AM/PM

toString() renders the view as RFC 9557.

Snapshots

snapshot() captures a view's fields as a plain serializable object, and a snapshot is accepted by the ZDate constructor — the memento pattern. This is why the method is on ZView and not named toObject/fromObject on ZDate: a snapshot records a view of the instant (fields as seen through a zone and calendar), and restoring it reconstructs the same instant from that record.

const snap = d.local.snapshot()   // plain object; also what toJSON() emits
const restored = new ZDate(snap)  // same instant

Use snapshots to persist or transmit a date with its view context intact, without inventing a custom serialization.