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ErikOSnet0 Date parsing
Does anyone know how to parse a String in a predefined format to a Date? Specifically, I'm trying to convert '1-Apr' to a date.
As a Java developer, I can't believe how much time I am spending reinventing the wheel. Why is there no DateFormat, or SimpleDateFormat class? Why on earth didn't they just use Java like Google Apps does?
I can currently able to convert the day and year in Apex, ableit with tedious code. I tried to convert the month from Apr to 4 using an enum (ordinal() returns position), but there doesn't seem to be a way to convert a String to its Enum counterpart like I can do in Java. In fact, ordinal() doesn't even seem to be compiler friendly, despite being documented (perhaps it is new to Apex 17.)
Here is what I have so far, with month obviously hard coded:
/**
* Dates are in the format of d-Mon in the CSV file. E.g., "1-May" is the first
* of may. The year should put it in the future. Thus, if it is "1-Jan" and it
* is currently December of 1009, then the year should be 2010.
**/
public Date convertEffectiveDate(String inDate) {
String[] dateParts = inDate.split('-');
Integer day = Integer.valueOf(dateParts[0]);
Integer month = 4;
Date effective = Date.newInstance(Date.today().year(), month, day);
if (effective < Date.today())
effective.addYears(1);
return effective;
}
Did you try using a map (Map<String,Integer>) instead of an enum? Mapping string to a number...
There is an equivalent of the SimpleDateFormat.parse() method in Apex. Please refer to the following link for more details:
http://www.salesforce.com/us/developer/docs/apexcode/Content/apex_methods_system_datetime.htm
Sample code:
datetime myDateTime = datetime.now();string mydtstring = mydatetime.format();system.assertequals('12/27/2009 11:46 AM', mydtstring);
That converted a date to a string, not the other way around. Moreover, you need to be able to specify the format.
http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/docs/api/java/text/SimpleDateFormat.html
In my case, the format is "d-MMM".
Anyway, I caved and created a DateUtilities for my wheel reinvention process. Here is what I created for this problem:
public with sharing class DateUtilities {
public static List<String> MONTHS = new String[12];
static {
MONTHS[0] = 'Jan';
MONTHS[1] = 'Feb';
MONTHS[2] = 'Mar';
MONTHS[3] = 'Apr';
MONTHS[4] = 'May';
MONTHS[5] = 'Jun';
MONTHS[6] = 'Jul';
MONTHS[7] = 'Aug';
MONTHS[8] = 'Sep';
MONTHS[9] = 'Oct';
MONTHS[10] = 'Nov';
MONTHS[11] = 'Dec';
}
/**
* Converts a month from its 3 letter abbreviation to the number of the
* month, from 1 to 12.
**/
public static Integer convertMonth(String shortMonth) {
if (shortMonth != null) {
shortMonth = shortMonth.toUpperCase();
Integer idx = 1;
for (String month : DateUtilities.MONTHS) {
if (month.toUpperCase().equals(shortMonth))
return idx;
else
idx++;
}
}
return -1;
}
static testMethod void testConvertMonthToInt() {
System.assertEquals(5, convertMonth('May'));
System.assertEquals(7, convertMonth('JUL'));
System.assertEquals(1, convertMonth('jan'));
System.assertEquals(12, convertMonth('DeC'));
}
}
3 years later I hear your pain.
At least in my case I need to validate an input field where users either select or type in a date which has to be in yyyy-MM-dd format.
This date is passed to a SOQL query which will cry if the format is wrong or if a bad value is passed in like 9999-99-99.
So I wrote a regex to test the format first and then used Date.valueof. This will throw an exception if the date value is wrong. I pass the exception message to the user for validation messages.
So its a mix of reinventing the wheel and using built in stuff.