Question

I’m sure this has been encountered many times over, and written about elsewhere. Apologies in advance for the long-winded post, but I wanted to provide as much detail as I could up front.

I have a workstation running the JVM in one timezone (in my case -07:00). I have an Oracle database configured to persist date values in UTC.

I am attempting to use jodatime extension, http://www.joda.org/joda-time-hibernate/, that has custom Hibernate types, one of which is PersistentDateTime.

Here is a sample from my .hbm.xml.

<hibernate-mapping>
<class name="com.spp.mui.domain.MktBidHourly" table="MKTBIDHOURLY">
    <comment>Entity to represent the hourly participant bids</comment>
    <id name="bidId" type="big_decimal">
        <column name="BIDID" precision="22" scale="0" />
        <generator class="foreign">
            <param name="property">mktBid</param>
        </generator>
    </id>
    <one-to-one name="mktBid" class="com.spp.mui.domain.MktAbstractBid" constrained="true"></one-to-one>

    <property name="period" type="org.joda.time.contrib.hibernate.PersistentDateTime">
        <column name="PERIOD" length="7">
            <comment>Identifies the Period for which the bid applies.</comment>
        </column>
    </property>
    <property name="bidCurveId" type="big_decimal">
        <column name="BIDCURVEID" precision="22" scale="0">
            <comment>A database-generated unique identifier for the bid curve</comment>
        </column>
    </property>
</class>

Note the period field in MktBidHourly.

So before executing a unit test for one of my DAOs (using Spring), I use a tool like Toad (for Oracle), to insert some data, that will be queried in the test, something like

insert into MKTBIDHOURLY values (33, (select to_timestamp(‘2011-08-03
13:00’, ‘YYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI’) from dual), 298384);

The Hibernate query in my DAO looks a little like this

public static final String QRY_FIND_BIDS =
        "from MktBid bid where bid.priceNodeId in (:priceNodeIdList) and bid.mktBidHourly.period in (:periodsList) and bid.mktBidType = (:bidType) and bid.participantId = (:participantId)";

 Query q = getSession().createQuery(MktQueries.QRY_FIND_BIDS);
        q.setParameterList("priceNodeIdList", priceNodeIds);
        q.setParameterList("periodsList", periods);
        q.setEntity("bidType", bidType);
        q.setBigDecimal("participantId", participantId);
        realBids = q.list();

Here’s the test method

@Test
public void testFindVirtualBids() throws ParseException {
    List<MktVirtualBid> candidateBids = new ArrayList<MktVirtualBid>();
    MktBidType bidType = new MktBidType(MktBid.VIRTUAL_BID);
    candidateBids.add(data.createMktVirtualBid(new BigDecimal(LOCATION_ID_1), false, timeDispatcher.getDateTimeFromXMLDateTime("2011-08-03T13:00:00-07:00"), new BigDecimal(CURVE_ID_1)));
    candidateBids.add(data.createMktVirtualBid(new BigDecimal(LOCATION_ID_2), false, timeDispatcher.getDateTimeFromXMLDateTime("2011-08-04T13:00:00-07:00"), new BigDecimal(CURVE_ID_2)));
    List<MktVirtualBid> foundBids = dao.findVirtualBids(bidType, new BigDecimal(PARTICIPANT_ID), candidateBids);
    Assert.assertEquals(2, foundBids.size());
}

Note the timeDispatcher method is using

ISODateTimeFormat.dateTimeParser().withZone(DateTimeZone.getDefault())

as formatter, and then

parseDateTime(xmlDateTime).withZone(DateTimeZone.UTC)

to obtain a DateTime.

Here’s some sample output from a test run (sorry for the poor formatting)

16:22:31,729 DEBUG [AbstractBatcher] about to open PreparedStatement (open PreparedStatements: 0, globally: 0)
16:22:31,732 DEBUG [SQL]
select
mktbid0_.BIDID as BIDID5_,
mktbid0_.BIDTYPE as BIDTYPE5_,
mktbid0_.PARTICIPANTID as PARTICIP3_5_,
mktbid0_.PNODEID as PNODEID5_,
mktbid0_.USEBIDSLOPE as USEBIDSL5_5_
from
DEVMOI2.MKTBID mktbid0_,
DEVMOI2.MKTBIDHOURLY mktbidhour1_
where
mktbid0_.BIDID=mktbidhour1_.BIDID
and (
mktbid0_.PNODEID in (
? , ?
)
)
and (
mktbidhour1_.PERIOD in (
? , ?
)
)
and mktbid0_.BIDTYPE=?
and mktbid0_.PARTICIPANTID=? Hibernate:
select
mktbid0_.BIDID as BIDID5_,
mktbid0_.BIDTYPE as BIDTYPE5_,
mktbid0_.PARTICIPANTID as PARTICIP3_5_,
mktbid0_.PNODEID as PNODEID5_,
mktbid0_.USEBIDSLOPE as USEBIDSL5_5_
from
DEVMOI2.MKTBID mktbid0_,
DEVMOI2.MKTBIDHOURLY mktbidhour1_
where
mktbid0_.BIDID=mktbidhour1_.BIDID
and (
mktbid0_.PNODEID in (
? , ?
)
)
and (
mktbidhour1_.PERIOD in (
? , ?
)
)
and mktbid0_.BIDTYPE=?
and mktbid0_.PARTICIPANTID=?
16:22:31,733 TRACE [AbstractBatcher] preparing statement
16:22:31,798 TRACE [BasicBinder] binding parameter [1] as [NUMERIC] – 262235
16:22:31,798 TRACE [BasicBinder] binding parameter [2] as [NUMERIC] – 262234
16:22:31,799 TRACE [BasicBinder] binding parameter [3] as [TIMESTAMP] – Wed Aug 03 13:00:00 PDT 2011
16:22:31,799 TRACE [BasicBinder] binding parameter [4] as [TIMESTAMP] – Thu Aug 04 13:00:00 PDT 2011
16:22:31,801 TRACE [BasicBinder] binding parameter [5] as [VARCHAR] – D
16:22:31,801 TRACE [BasicBinder] binding parameter [6] as [NUMERIC] – 260699

and then the test fails

Results :

Failed tests:
testFindVirtualBids(com.spp.mui.persistence.hibernate.MktBidDAOTest): expected:<2> but was:<0>

Tests run: 2, Failures: 1, Errors: 0, Skipped: 0

Why won’t my test’s assertion pass?

Answer 1

I solved this myself. The tricky part in how I was inserting dates. I opted for another route, which unfortunately I cannot share the code for. Suffice it to say I developed a test base class with a routine for loading in CSV files. It leverages Spring’s TestContext framework, particularly an @BeforeTransaction annotated method which delegates to helpers to deal with various String types (e.g., date, number, byte[], etc).

The formatter is fundamentally correct. For those who are curious The timeDispatcher’s method impl looks like this…

 public DateTime getDateTimeFromXMLDateTime(String xmlDateTime) {  
    if(xmlDateTime == null || "".equals(xmlDateTime)) {  
        return null;  
    } else {  
        return isoParser.parseDateTime(xmlDateTime).withZone(gmtTZ);  
    }  
}  

where

isoParser = ISODateTimeFormat.dateTimeParser(DateTimeZone.getDefault());  

and

gmtTZ = DateTimeZone.UTC;