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Java Core Service Trouble with DateTime Convertion to java.util.Date

In my previous post A Core Service Java Client, I was describing how to generate the proxy classes for the Java client. It turns out, however, that the custom bindings I was using for converting DateTime string representations to java.util.Date were not working properly. When I was running my client, all the dates were coming back 'null'.

The problem was the default Adapter code generated by wsimport. I saw the conversion too simplistically. The custom bindings that I was using

<jxb:bindings version="1.0" xmlns:jxb="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/jaxb" xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">
  <jxb:globalBindings generateElementProperty="false">
    <jxb:javaType name="java.util.Date" xmlType="xs:dateTime"/>
  </jxb:globalBindings>
</jxb:bindings>

would generate the following adapter code:

public class Adapter1 extends XmlAdapter<String, Date> {
    public Date unmarshal(String value) {
        return new Date(value);
    }

    public String marshal(Date value) {
        if (value == null) {
            return null;
        }
        return value.toString();
    }
}

The dates trafficked between the webservice and client are in the format yyyy-MM-ddTHH:mm:ss and, for the adapter above, would yield an exception and a 'null' overall value.

Solution

The solution is to provide my own converter. I implemented the following two utility methods:

public static String parseDateToString(Date date) {
    SimpleDateFormat formatter = new SimpleDateFormat(DATE_PATTERN);
    return formatter.format(date);
}

public static Date parseStringToDate(String date) {
    try {
        SimpleDateFormat formatter = new SimpleDateFormat(DATE_PATTERN);
        return formatter.parse(date);
    } catch (ParseException e) {
        // big bubu
    }
    return null;
}

private static final String DATE_PATTERN = "yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss";

Note: SimpleDateFormat is not thread-safe, hence the new instance on every call.

The custom bindings needs to be changed to instruct wsimport to make use of the two methods (as per documentation):

<jxb:bindings version="1.0" xmlns:jxb="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/jaxb" xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">
  <jxb:globalBindings generateElementProperty="false">
    <jxb:javaType name="java.util.Date" xmlType="xs:dateTime"
      parseMethod="mitza.coreservice.util.Utils.parseStringToDate"
      printMethod="mitza.coreservice.util.Utils.parseDateToString" />
  </jxb:globalBindings>
</jxb:bindings>

I had put the two converter methods inside class Utils, in package mitza.coreservice.util.

Finally, running wsimport again yields the following Adapter class:

public class Adapter1 extends XmlAdapter<String, Date> {
    public Date unmarshal(String value) {
        return (mitza.coreservice.util.Utils.parseStringToDate(value));
    }

    public String marshal(Date value) {
        return (mitza.coreservice.util.Utils.parseDateToString(value));
    }
}

This works very well...

The updated code is available in my Google Code project.


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