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Asked: 2026-06-08T08:59:13+00:00

I have not much experience with MultiTimeZone and / or local dates, so I’m

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I have not much experience with MultiTimeZone and / or local dates, so I’m getting my hands dirty on this but I do not how how and where to start, so be gently with me 🙂

I have two types of Date(Time) fields:

  1. Date (storing Day, Month and Year)
  2. DateTime (same as 1 but including time)

How should I define my properties in Play?

 @Formats.DateTime(pattern="MM-dd-yyyy")
 public Date reqCompletionDate;

OR should I go with JodaTime (never used it before):

@Type(type="org.joda.time.contrib.hibernate.PersistentDateTime")
public DateTime reqCompletionDate;

If I go for java.util.Date, how can I convert it to the users local Date format (i.e yyyy-MM-dd)? Plays automatic binding will fail because of the format issues, so I need to create a Custom Binder for it? This will affect all my Date fields, right?

Or would you advise to use getters and setters for all the Date(Time) fields so that I can pass the users Locale to get the correct time. In this case, the automatic bind of Play will fail and I still would need a custom binders for Date and DateTime?

Or am I over-thinking this all and should handle this in a different way? Thanks for your thoughts!

UPDATE: 2012-07-23: I think I will follow these steps:

Step 1: Make play starts and initialize with UTC timezone

Step 2: Make all date time fields same format, according to UTC time zone

Step 3: Convert to users local time as late as possible

When user posts a form containing a local date (time) convert it as soon as possible to UTC time. If I have time I will post my code here.

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  1. Editorial Team

    In short, use JodaTime. java.util.Date should be taken into a quiet field, given a last cigarette, and shot.

    A longer version:

    Multi-Locale can be complicated to get right, and it’s not just a concern of presenting dates and times in the user’s timezone.

    Some examples of the things you need to consider:

    • Is your birthday a day earlier when rendered in an Australian timezone?
    • If the user tells the support guy it happened on Tuesday, but the support guy’s Tuesday is + 7 hours, will he find it in the log?
    • Which midnight should the sale set for the 17th start on?

    java.util.Date is limited to representing a single instant in time. That makes it very hard to cope with those kinds of scenarios. You can’t even tell by examining one whether it is representing a date or a datetime.

    Joda provides separate types for these separate concepts, which makes working with them much simpler. LocalDate for example has no timezone or time component. Your birthday is a LocalDate so it never changes, DateTimes are represented as a different type. There are also types for other concepts like Interval, Duration which makes time/date comparison much easier. In the rare case you have to support locales that don’t have use the Gregorian calendar you can easily swap Chronologies.

    If you’re using JPA, the adapters for Joda exist and work. Also Joda does provide interoperability with java.util.Date if you have to use it elsewhere.

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