Question

The dates in my sqlite in android is saving 12/31/69 instead of the actual date. I have this in my db adapter:

    + KEY_DATE + " DATETIME DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP

In my activity i have

        Date date = new Date(cursor.getLong(cursor.getColumnIndex(mDbHelper.KEY_DATE)));
        mDateFormat = DateFormat.getDateInstance(DateFormat.SHORT);

When I do a Log.d(“Debug”, mDateFormat.format(date)) it outputs 12/31/69 what am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

mDateFormat is just a date format – you haven’t used the value of date from the previous line anywhere. You want something like:

Log.d("Debug", mDateFormat.format(date));

Now that may still give the wrong value – but we can move on to that. It would really help if you’d show more of what’s in your adapter than the partial statement you’ve got there. We haven’t got nearly enough context.

EDIT: You’re calling getLong, but you’ve got a default value of CURRENT_TIMESTAMP, which looks like it’ll come out as text:

If the default value of a column is CURRENT_TIME, CURRENT_DATE or CURRENT_TIMESTAMP, then the value used in the new row is a text representation of the current UTC date and/or time. For CURRENT_TIME, the format of the value is “HH:MM:SS”. For CURRENT_DATE, “YYYY-MM-DD”. The format for CURRENT_TIMESTAMP is “YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS”.

It’s unclear to me what you’d expect to happen when you fetch that value as a long… according to the documentation, the result is implementation-specific – I suspect it’s returning 0, giving you a date of the Unix epoch, which would make sense with your output if you’re in a time zone west of Greenwich.