Question

I am in the unfortunate position that I need to use a composite id in a Grails app where I work with legacy data. This means I have to override some actions in the controller, but as I did this I was struck by the fact that I could not use use a date argument directly as a parameter to a dynamic method.

Instead of just doing MyLegacyObj.findBySystemIdAndLogDate(params.systemId, params.logDate), I first needed to parse the date string before giving it to the dynamic method. To further complicate matters I had no idea what format the date string had (until I added lots of log.debug() string to the output). So now I have a bit of code looking like this

def formatter = new SimpleDateFormat("EEE MMM d HH:mm:ss z yyyy")
MyLegacyObj.findBySystemIdAndLogDate(params.systemId, formatter.parse(params.logDate));

This feels unoptimal, no to say dangerous (what if the date format changes with the locale?)? What would be a recommended way of doing this, and do I really need to parse dates at all?

Answer 1

Date is a pretty complex object and params are just Strings, so Date is submitted in parts. It is “magically” assembled from the parts when assigning x.properties = params.

Command object will do the work for you, if you add a Date field to it.

It has nothing to do with methods’ dynamic or static invocation. Your GSP that renders Date editor might interfere too.