Is there any field converter for java.util.Date? - java

I would like to use a Date field in my playOrm mapping. However, if I use
private Date birthDate;
in my bean, it gives me an exception saying this type is not supported.

I can add Date if you open an issue. I was thinking of actually throwing an exception when people use Date that says this though instead..
Please use LocalDate, LocalTime or LocalDateTime from joda-time which
was supposed to be added in jdk7 but more than likely will end up in
jdk8. The reason for this is java.util.Date and Calendar from java
are buggy and have lots of known bugs in the jdk bug system.
See this as well
Joda Time to be included in Java 7?
If however, you still want to use Date, here is how
Map<Class, Converter> converters = new HashMap<Class, Converter>();
Converter d = new DateConverter();
converters.put(Date.class, d);
Then you need to implement the Converter interface with your DateConverter class and implement the byte[] to Date and Date to byte[] and String to Date and Date to String methods. NOTE: These methods are all called for S-SQL and for converting entities...it all uses the same converters.
The string conversions are VERY important as the command line tool will use them to convert your command line S-SQL to query the objects.
HOWEVER, if you want it built-in to PlayOrm, just open an issue and I can do it pretty quickly BUT I still suggest you use LocalDateTime instead in joda-time as it is more reliable and you can do more with it....after using joda-time quite a bit, it is on-par with C# date apis and way better than the old java stuff.
Dean

I'm not sure what you're asking for, but as stated in the Java API for Date, "As of JDK 1.1, the Calendar class should be used to convert between dates and time fields and the DateFormat class should be used to format and parse date strings. The corresponding methods in Date are deprecated."

Related

Strange String Format for Date

Java application gets a stream of JSON messages,
within those, the String fields, that represent some date are formatted like \"2019-01-01+01:00\".
It looks like a normal date, followed by the timezone-offset, this guess of mine has been confirmed on the producer side.
Problem:
Even though I still do not really get the logic behind it, I have to parse it in my Java App.
The simplest approach would be to split that string on the '+' character and just parse the date part with some pattern in LocalDate.
But out of curiosity, maybe there is some Date format in Java I do not know of, which could allow for this strange string format?
Yes there is. DateTimeFormatter.ISO_OFFSET_DATE. I agree that it’s weird, and I don’t know what use you should have of the offset. But you can parse into a LocalDate using the formatter:
String stringFromJson = "2019-01-01+01:00";
LocalDate date = LocalDate.parse(stringFromJson, DateTimeFormatter.ISO_OFFSET_DATE);
System.out.println(date);
Output:
2019-01-01
Splitting at the + (plus sign) will not always work. A date with an offset may also come with a negative offset, for example -04:00, and with offset Z (for zero, that is, UTC). Of course you could write code to handle each of those situations manually, but it’s better to use the built-in formatter.
Don’t use Date and SimpleDateFormat. Those classes are poorly designed and long outdated, the latter in particular notoriously troublesome. Use LocalDate and DateTimeFormatter, both from java.time, the modern Java date and time API.

How to convert ZonedDateTime/OffsetDateTime to Date using ThreeTenABP?

Using the ThreeTen Android Backport library, what is the simplest way to convert a ZonedDateTime or OffsetDateTime into an old-school java.util.Date instance?
If I had full Java 8 libs at my disposal, this of course would be the way to do it (as in this question):
Date.from(zonedDateTime.toInstant());
But I cannot use that on Android; specifically Date.from(Instant instant) is missing.
Well, one straightforward way is to get milliseconds since epoch and create the Date from that:
long epochMilli = zonedDateTime.toInstant().toEpochMilli();
Date date = new Date(epochMilli);
Feel free to point out if there's some preferable way.
See DateTimeUtils which handles the methods added to classes like java.util.Date:
http://www.threeten.org/threetenbp/apidocs/org/threeten/bp/DateTimeUtils.html
Edit: using that, the complete code would be:
DateTimeUtils.toDate(zonedDateTime.toInstant())

Which Android APIs to use for simple date and time functions

The set of date and time functions I need are pretty basic.
An object to represent a date/time (for convenience in function calls).
Conversion functions to and from y,m,d,h,m,s.
Format/parse functions to and from numeric-only localised string representation. Eg dd/mm/yyyy, yyyy-mm-dd, mm.dd.yyyy or whatever order and delimiters are locally expected.
A system function to get the current local date and time (timezones not required).
Compatible with the DatePicker widget.
Thread safe. Static functions available to both UI and worker (NDK) threads.
So far I've found that:
Calendar and GregorianCalendar can do the conversions, but they're clunky to use and they're not thread safe.
SimpleDateFormat can do the formatting, if I could only figure out which magic string to feed it! The default is not numeric.
Time has a nicer set of conversion functions, but has no date/time object and the parse/format functions are documented only indirectly. And it smells a lot more like Unix than Java.
So do I find a way to fix the thread safety and try to persuade SimpleDateFormat to give me what I need? Or do I give up and jump ship to Time? Or have I missed something?
Just to be clear, this is not a request for a library recommendation or a shopping list. It's a request for assistance on how to implement a specific set of functions using the given Android API. I'm looking for an expert on using these libraries to point out a path through the morass. I would hope that a well-written answer would benefit other readers also struggling with this part of Android.
Personally I find Joda-Time to be able to handle almost everything you need for date and time. Since it's just a .jar it should be able to be imported.
Here's how to use it, for the questions you asked specifically:
An object to represent a date/time - DateTime for immutable or MutableDateTime for one that you need to apply transformations to.
These objects have many methods for conversion, see the Joda-Time API for AbstractDateTime as an example, as all of Joda's classes extend AbstractDateTime
You can use String convertedToString = new DateTime().toString("yyyy-MM-dd") to get it as 2014-05-05. To reverse this, use this API: DateTimeFormatter parseDateTime(someStringThatRepresentsADate)
DateTime now = new DateTime() gives you now, as a DateTime object
You can get a DateTime object from several other classes, such as Calendar by doing something like DateTime fromCalendar = new DateTime(myCalendarObject)
See The FAQ for Joda on multi-threading
In order to import Joda into your Android project, assuming you're using Android studio and Gradle, see this answer: Android Studio: Add jar as library?

How to use java.util.Calendar in GWT

I have to use java.util.Calendar in GWT entry point, but I got error while running the application, that is because GWT is not able to find source code, is there anyway I could fix this issue.
Thanks in advance!!!
java.util.Calendar is not an emulated class. You can find a list of emulated classes here:
http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/doc/latest/RefJreEmulation.html
I would strongly advise not to use any date/calendar library on the client side. You will probably only get yourself into trouble. In fact, even though java.sql.Date and java.util.Date are emulated in GWT, I would not use these either. If you're looking to use Calendar, then chances are you want to support timezones on the client. Using the emulated Date classes, you will somehow have to convert the client's Date from the browser's timezone to some target timezone (GMT or whatever the user defined in user preferences?). This will most definitely be error prone. Using GWT's TimeZone adds other issues. For instance, how do you map between java TimeZones and GWT TimeZones?
I recommend doing all date manipulation AND formatting on the server. On the client, you can simply use a date/month/year triplet. The server can have an association between user (or organization) and java.util.TimeZone (or joda timezone). Using the triplet and timezone you can easily create the specific instance in time.
You may be able to use com.google.gwt.user.datepicker.client.CalendarUtil.
No there is no way to use the java.util.Calendar in GWT because there is no equivalent in JavaScript. But there is an accepted feature request for it. Maybe you will find some hints in the comments of the request.
The following shows how to use Joda Time to extract any date information from a Java Date type with Joda Times format() function and use it to build a new Date() using Joda Time's parse() function.
static DateTimeFormat dtf = DateTimeFormat.getFormat("yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss.SSS");
static DateTimeFormat datefmt = DateTimeFormat.getFormat("yyyy-MM-dd ");
static DateTimeFormat timefmt = DateTimeFormat.getFormat("HH:mm:ss.SSS");
public Date getDateTime(Date date, Date time) {
String datetime = datefmt.format(date) + timefmt.format(time);
return dtf.parse(datetime);
}
Have you tried adding actual code of the class to your project? Some Java SDK classes compile well even though they are not in JRE white list.
For those who prefer implementing the math directly, here is a solution for how to add days to an existing date object without using Calendar or any deprecated functions:
private Date addDays(Date dateIn, int numDays)
{
long milisPerDay = 86400000;
// convert the dateIn to milliseconds
long dateInMilis = dateIn.getTime();
// add numDays to the date
dateInMilis = dateInMilis + (numDays * milisPerDay);
return new Date(dateInMilis);
}
Here's how to get the current year as a String (very useful for Copyright notices)
long time = System.currentTimeMillis();
long milisPerYear = new BigInteger("31536000000").longValue();
String currentYear = String.valueOf((int) Math.floor(time / milisPerYear) + 1970);
Finding the constants such as number of miliseconds in a day, year, etc. is easy with Google. The tricky part is adding months, since the number of milliseconds in a month is going to depend on the month. If there's any demand for it, I'd be happy to write a function and post it here in order to add and subtract months.

How should date properties be defined in a java class?

I have a simple java object with several date properties and I always seem to change my mind on how to define them. Should the properties be defined as date objects or strings? The object is going to be used in struts 1.3 application with iBatis as the persistence layer and mysql as the database. The database columns are defined as datetime and they can possibly be null and I usually don’t care about the time portion.
public Date getForcastDate();
or
public String getForcastDate();
Most of the existing code base uses strings, but that just doesn’t seem quite right to me.
Keep your dates as Dates. That way you can change formatting depending on locales, check for invalid dates, sort by them etc.
By keeping them as strings you're potentially throwing away data (e.g. milliseconds if your formatter doesn't use them) and definitely behaviour.
Using strong-typing (e.g. keeping them as Dates) will aid in terms of development. Your method signatures become clearer, refactoring using IDE tooling becomes easier etc. Otherwise you end up with APIs that talk in nothing but strings, it's trivial to mix up parameters, and it becomes impossible to work out what's going on.
Tip: Check out Joda-Time as a better alternative to the standard java.util.Date.
I would use Date object because it cleaner to store a Date and convert it to a String when needed. Otherwise you have to hard code a formatted date into a String field.
I would never use Strings in this cas as what would today be 8/3/11 or 3/8/11 or 2011-03-08. This is really a specific case of trying to use the most restrictive type/class possible for a variable. This is so that you can understand its behaviour more fully, both by having a restricted or specialised set of methods and by helping documentation of other classes using it. Using a Date here would allow you to use a Calendar object to add days or months. Conversion to or from a string only needs to be done for input and output.
In practice if they were only dates I would crete my own Date class so could ignore times or use JodaTime which provides easier manipulation than the java Date
In my code I always use the most high level object. In this case I would suggest - Calendar. Here is separate discussion about Date and Calendar. I always think this way - converting Calendar/Date to String is simple - use SimpleDateFormatter. But very often you will need to do something with the date (add several days or hours, subtract a year, handle timezones etc) and then each time you would have to convert it from String to Calendar/Date.
Date if you had to, but java.util.Calendar would probably be more appropriate nowadays. With a String you'd have to worry about format like #jzd mentioned. With Calendar, you can easily switch between formats. Also Calendar lets you get at the date with Calendar.getTime()

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