Question

I am developing a Spring/Hibernate web application. I have a DataTranseferObject where the input from the jsp page is stored to be used by different services and eventually saved to a database.

One of the fields in the jsp page is deliveryDate. I want to store it as a date type in the database:

from delivery.java

@Column(name = "DELIVERY_DATE") 
private Date deliveryDate; 

public void setDeliveryDate(Date deliveryDate){
    this.deliveryDate= deliveryDate;
}
public Date getDeliveryDate(){
    return deliveryDate;
}  

I am trying to validate the field in the jsp page so that only the "yyyy-MM-dd" format is allowed. To do this I have the deliveryDate as a String type in the DataTransferObject and I’m validating it with the @Pattern annotation as such:

@Pattern(regexp="((19|20)\\d\\d)-(0?[1-9]|1[012])-(0?[1-9]|[12][0-9]|3[01])", message="please enter date in fromat yyyy-MM-dd")
@NotNull(message="delivery date is a required field")
private String deliveryDate;

Since I want to store it in the database as a Date type I need to convert the String to a Date type. This I am trying to do using a service:

@Transactional
public Date stringToDateConversion(String stringDate){

    DateFormat formatter;
    Date date;
    formatter = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd");
    date = (Date) formatter.parse(stringDate);
    return date;
}

but it’s not working since formatter.parse(stringDate) gives "Unhandled exception type ParseException"

I need the service to return a Date type so I can use it in the controller:

    Date deliveryDate= deliveryService.stringToDateConversion(deliveryDto.getDeliveryDate());
    delivery.setDeliveryDate(deliveryDate);

How do I correctly convert the String to a Date type and return a Date type?

Thanks for the help!
/D

Answer 1

Just handle ParseException with call of parsing String to Date

DateFormat formatter =  null;
java.util.Date date = null;
formatter = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd");
try{
  date = formatter.parse(stringDate);
  //if you want you can convert it to `java.sql.Date`
}catch(ParseException ex){//do whatever you would like to}

return date;