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Date Utils

Gorm-tools provides a set of static utils which allow us to manipulate with dates much easier.

DateUtil¶

Parsing a date in a string¶

stringToDate expects a string with date in the simple format yyyy-MM-dd and returns Date instance:

     Date date = DateUtil.stringToDate("2017-10-19")

     assert date
     assert date == new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd").parse("2017-10-19")

it's a shortcut for convertStringToDateTime

     Date date = DateUtil.convertStringToDateTime("2017-10-19", "yyyy-MM-dd")

     assert date
     assert date == new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd").parse("2017-10-19")

Converting Date instance to a string¶

dateToJsonString converts a date to the format yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss.SSSZ

    Date date = new SimpleDateFormat('yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss').parse('2017-10-20 22:00:00')

    String result = DateUtil.dateToJsonString(date)
    assert result == date.format("yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss.SSSZ")

it's a shortcut for dateToString method which accepts a format

    Date date = new SimpleDateFormat('yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss').parse('2017-10-20 22:00:00')

    String result = DateUtil.dateToString(date, "yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss.SSSZ")
    assert result == date.format("yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss.SSSZ")


    result = DateUtil.dateToString(date)
    assert result == date.format("MM/dd/yyyy hh:mm:ss")

Get the difference now and a specified date in hours¶

    Calendar calendar = Calendar.getInstance()
    calendar.add(Calendar.HOUR, 1)
    calendar.add(Calendar.MINUTE, 30)

    assert 1L = DateUtil.getDateDifference_inHours(calendar.getTime())

Get the difference between dates¶

We can calculate get number of months between two dates, for example:

    SimpleDateFormat format = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd")
    Date date1 = format.parse("2017-10-19")
    Date date2 = format.parse("2017-12-19")

    2 == DateUtil.getMonthDiff(date1, date2)

or number of days

    Date now = new Date()

    assert 0 == DateUtil.getDaysBetween(now, now)
    assert -10 == DateUtil.getDaysBetween(now - 10, now)
    assert  10 == DateUtil.getDaysBetween(now + 10, now)

MultiFormatDateConverter¶

MultiFormatDateConverter extends general type conversion system for dates. It is used to date formatted string to date.

Under the hood it uses DateUtil and supports next formats "yyyy-MM-dd", "yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss.SSSZ", "yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ssZ", "yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss", "MM/dd/yy"

To apply it to application add a spring bean for it. The bean name could be any

Dealing with timezones when storing dates.¶

By default JDBC drivers stores and retrieves the dates/timestamps in local JVM timezone. However it is generally recommended to use UTC for storing dates in database.

There are two ways to store the date values in UTC. One is to change the default time zone of JVM using TimeZone.setDefault( TimeZone.getTimeZone( "UTC" ) ); However this forces to change the jvm default time zone which may not be possible in all cases.

Another option is to use the hibernate setting hibernamte.jdbc.time_zone

With grails, the timezone which hibernate uses can be configured in application.yml as shown below.

hibernate:
    jdbc:
      time_zone: UTC

This will instruct hibernate to store and retrieve the dates in UTC timezone.

However it should be noted that if you query the date values with JDBC it will be retrieved in JVM timezone and not UTC and will need to be converted to UTC manually or use the overloaded version of ResultSet.getTimeStamp that takes calendar as second argument Eg. ResultSet#getTimestamp(int columnIndex, Calendar cal)

References on this¶

http://in.relation.to/2016/09/12/jdbc-time-zone-configuration-property/ https://hibernate.atlassian.net/browse/HHH-11396 https://vladmihalcea.com/2017/03/14/how-to-store-date-time-and-timestamps-in-utc-time-zone-with-jdbc-and-hibernate/ https://stackoverflow.com/questions/31965179/whats-new-in-hibernate-orm-5