Question

What I Want to Do ?

I have a Class Customers that has a variable dob // Date of Birth

I am trying to take an input from the user using a java Swing Text Field.

Convert it into a java date and then convert into java.sql.Date, so that i can store it in my MySQL database.

This is the setter method for Customer class

public  void setDOB(java.sql.Date dob)
{
    DateOfBirth = dob;
}   

Here is the code for my Swing Class(Application Window Loader)

//Date
            if(textField_5.getText().isEmpty())
                lblerr.setVisible(true);
            else
            {
                try {
                    SimpleDateFormat sdf = new SimpleDateFormat("dd-MM-YYYY");
                    Date dob = null;
                    dob = sdf.parse(textField_5.getText());
                    java.sql.Date sqlDate = new java.sql.Date(dob.getTime());
                    c1.setDOB(sqlDate);

                } catch (ParseException e) {
                    // TODO Auto-generated catch block
                    e.printStackTrace();
                }

                allinfoisentered = true;
            }   

textField_5 – is the Field Where User Inputs the Date.

I Tested My App With the following different inputs :

1. 12-12-1993
2. 10-05-1970

The Problem Is : The value that gets stored in MySQL Table is 1992-12-27, i have a strong feeling that this is some default date.

I want to know, How do i parse the string into Date and then send it to MySQL table.

Answer 1

(As discussed in comments…)

You have two problems:

• Your parsing format is incorrect. It should use “yyyy” instead of “YYYY”

• More importantly (IMO) your error handling is incorrect. You’re using this catch block:

  catch (ParseException e) {
      // TODO Auto-generated catch block
      e.printStackTrace();
  }
  

  … which means that even if parsing fails, you’ll insert all the data except the date, which wouldn’t have been set. You should have been able to get the information from the log files anyway, but presumably either you’re not logging System.err, or you didn’t look at the logs.

Error handling is very important. If an exception occurs when parsing the data, I would expect you not to want to insert the record at all – instead, the error should be propagated up the stack, forcing you to take note of it, and not losing the information. So you probably wanted something like this instead:

catch (ParseException e) {
    throw new DataValidationException(
        "Error parsing date: " + textField_5.getText(), e);
}

(Where DataValidationException is just a made-up exception – you should consider what you want to use consistently in your app.)

Two things are vitally important when an error occurs:

• You should handle it properly at the time. Often this means aborting the current operation, although in some cases you could retry, or continue without some unimportant information.
• You should capture enough information to understand the error later.