Skip to main content

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.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Toolkit - Dynamic Content Queries

This post if part of a series about the  File System Toolkit  - a custom content delivery API for SDL Tridion. This post presents the Dynamic Content Query capability. The requirements for the Toolkit API are that it should be able to provide CustomMeta queries, pagination, and sorting -- all on the file system, without the use third party tools (database, search engines, indexers, etc). Therefore I had to implement a simple database engine and indexer -- which is described in more detail in post Writing My Own Database Engine . The querying logic does not make use of cache. This means the query logic is executed every time. When models are requested, the models are however retrieved using the ModelFactory and those are cached. Query Class This is the main class for dynamic content queries. It is the entry point into the execution logic of a query. The class takes as parameter a Criterion (presented below) which triggers the execution of query in all sub-criteria of a Criterio

A DD4T.net Implementation - Custom Binary Publisher

The default way to publish binaries in DD4T is implemented in class DD4T.Templates.Base.Utils.BinaryPublisher and uses method RenderedItem.AddBinary(Component) . This produces binaries that have their TCM URI as suffix in their filename. In my recent project, we had a requirement that binary file names should be clean (without the TCM URI suffix). Therefore, it was time to modify the way DD4T was publishing binaries. The method in charge with publishing binaries is called PublishItem and is defined in class BinaryPublisher . I therefore extended the BinaryPublisher and overrode method PublishItem. public class CustomBinaryPublisher : BinaryPublisher { private Template currentTemplate; private TcmUri structureGroupUri; In its simplest form, method PublishItem just takes the item and passes it to the AddBinary. In order to accomplish the requirement, we must specify a filename while publishing. This is the file name part of the binary path of Component.BinaryConten

Scaling Policies

This post is part of a bigger topic Autoscaling Publishers in AWS . In a previous post we talked about the Auto Scaling Groups , but we didn't go into details on the Scaling Policies. This is the purpose of this blog post. As defined earlier, the Scaling Policies define the rules according to which the group size is increased or decreased. These rules are based on instance metrics (e.g. CPU), CloudWatch custom metrics, or even CloudWatch alarms and their states and values. We defined a Scaling Policy with Steps, called 'increase_group_size', which is triggered first by the CloudWatch Alarm 'Publish_Alarm' defined earlier. Also depending on the size of the monitored CloudWatch custom metric 'Waiting for Publish', the Scaling Policy with Steps can add a difference number of instances to the group. The scaling policy sets the number of instances in group to 1 if there are between 1000 and 2000 items Waiting for Publish in the queue. It also sets the