Question

Here I am explaining the scenario –

The user, after providing a service has to provide input of the start and end time of the service, but it has to be on the same date. Now when s/he tries to give input like

• 11:45 PM as start time
• 12:00 AM as end time

where for example date is: 20/03/12 that means this is a 15 minute service.

The user gets some validation message like “start and end date are not in same date”. this is because, whenever s/he is providing 12:00 AM as end date, the system gets that as the starting time of the next day. That’s means:

• Start time: 11:45 PM – 20/03/12
• End time: 12:00 AM – 21/03/12

I am looking for a standard solution, how can this type of situation be handled?
FYI, its in a web application written in java.

Answer 1

Well 12:00 am is on the next day. Options:

• Check whether the inclusive end time is on the same day, by subtracting a millisecond from the exclusive end time, and use that for the check
• Explicitly check for midnight

You should think about other situations carefully though, e.g.

• 0 minutes of service, midnight to midnight on the same day
• 24 hours of service, midnight to midnight of the next day
• Attempt at 48 hours of service, midnight to midnight of 2 days later
• “Reversed” times: midnight today to midnight of the previous day

It’s also unclear how time zones are going to come into this – bear in mind that in some time zones, midnight won’t even occur on all days due to DST transitions.