Question

I’m trying to set my Period object using the “millis” constructor and have all the relevant fields be updated accordingly (years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, seconds)

That is, using the following code:

mPeriod = new Period(millis, PeriodType.standard());

doesn’t fill all the relevant fields accordingly.
only weeks and minutes (for input millis of 1325965615539)

can someone please help me figure this thing out ?

Answer 1

You can normalize it using Period#normalizedStandard();

However, there’s no way Period can “fill in all the relevant fields”, because it can’t make assumptions about the number of days in months or years. The best it can do is to turn it into weeks, days, and time fields.

The Javadoc touches on this, but not in great detail:

If the period contains years or months, then the months will be
normalized to be between 0 and 11. The days field and below will be
normalized as necessary, however this will not overflow into the
months field. Thus a period of 1 year 15 months will normalize to 2
years 3 months. But a period of 1 month 40 days will remain as 1 month
40 days.

^{(Emphasis mine)}

If you need it to normalize into years and months, you need to construct the Period with values in those fields.

Alternatively, you could use a Duration:

1. Construct a Duration with milliseconds

2. Use Duration#toPeriodFrom(ReadableInstant) to create a Period starting at a given instant in time (e.g. new DateTime()). According to the docs, this should work:

   This conversion will determine the fields of a period accurately. The
   results are based on the instant millis, the chronology of the
   instant, the standard period type and the length of this duration.

---

Here’s what normalize() should do to your millisecond input:

import org.joda.time.Period;

class Normalize {
        public static void main(String[] args) {
                Period period = new Period(1325965615539L);
                System.out.println(period);
                System.out.println(period.normalizedStandard());
        }
}

// outputs
PT368323H46M55.539S
P2192W2DT19H46M55.539S

Notice the second line has been normalized, but only up to weeks.