Question

My program needs to represent this date as a java.sql.date object , but it seems that when I create a new date (using the calendar) and set it to ‘9999-12-31’ and finally convert this java.util.date object to a java.sql.date object, this date is converted to something like ‘000-01-31’.

Calendar calendar = Calendar.getInstance();
calendar.set(9999, 12, 31);
infinityDate = new java.sql.Date(normalizeDate(calendar.getTime()).getTime());

infinityDate should be 31-12-9999
but when my code reaches here :

if(otherDate.equals(infinityDate))
{// Do stuff}

It never goes into the if condition as the infinityDate has for some reason been changed to 31-01-000, even though otherDate is infact ’31-12-9999′.

The fact that otherDate is 31-12-9999 tells me that java can represent this dates , but for some reason , when I construct it using a calendar it changes the date. (otherDate comes from a jdbc statement which fetches data from a database)

This reference date ’31-12-9999′ has been fixed by some client , so it cannot be changed and my program has to be able to compare some incoming date values with this.
Does anyone know why this is happening , I realize that http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_10,000_problem may be a problem for dates after year 9999 , but I should be safe by a day.

EDIT : The Normalize date method only “normalizes the given date to midnight of that day”

    private static java.util.Date normalizeDate(java.util.Date date) {
    Calendar calendar = Calendar.getInstance();
    calendar.setTime(date);
    calendar.set(Calendar.HOUR_OF_DAY, 0);
    calendar.set(Calendar.MINUTE, 0);
    calendar.set(Calendar.SECOND, 0);
    calendar.set(Calendar.MILLISECOND, 0);
    date = calendar.getTime();

    return date;
}

But , this issue was appearing before I was normalizing the date , I normalized it in an attempt to fix this.

Answer 1

Months are zero indexed. Use 11 for December, not 12. This is why you are rolling over the year.