Question

I am developing an application for sending SMS. I am storing the current time and showing in the sent history page by retrieving the time from the database. In the sent history page I want to display the time of the message was sent. Here I want to check that the message has been sent today or yesterday or the the day before yesterday like that. If the message was sent yesterday means then I need to display "Yesterday 20:00" like that and even the message was sent yesterday before means "Monday 20:00". I don’t know how it has to be done. Please help me if anybody knows.

Answer 1

You can do that easily using android.text.format.DateFormat class. Try something like this.

public String getFormattedDate(Context context, long smsTimeInMilis) {
    Calendar smsTime = Calendar.getInstance();
    smsTime.setTimeInMillis(smsTimeInMilis);

    Calendar now = Calendar.getInstance();

    final String timeFormatString = "h:mm aa";
    final String dateTimeFormatString = "EEEE, MMMM d, h:mm aa";
    final long HOURS = 60 * 60 * 60;
    if (now.get(Calendar.DATE) == smsTime.get(Calendar.DATE) ) {
        return "Today " + DateFormat.format(timeFormatString, smsTime);
    } else if (now.get(Calendar.DATE) - smsTime.get(Calendar.DATE) == 1  ){
        return "Yesterday " + DateFormat.format(timeFormatString, smsTime);
    } else if (now.get(Calendar.YEAR) == smsTime.get(Calendar.YEAR)) {
        return DateFormat.format(dateTimeFormatString, smsTime).toString();
    } else {
        return DateFormat.format("MMMM dd yyyy, h:mm aa", smsTime).toString();
    }
}

Check http://developer.android.com/reference/java/text/DateFormat.html for further understanding.