Comparing dates

[toudidel]

Comparing two dates differ always reports change only because one of them has different format.

For instance saving object with date field "2014-02-01 00:00:00.0" receives me message that it has been changed to "Sat Feb 01 00:00:00 CET 2014" (so the same value but other format).

Is it possible to ignore the format comparing dates?

[SQiShER]

Do you store these dates as strings? Would it be possible to change the type to java.util.Date? That way the differ could simply use the equals method to compare the two dates. Currently I'm working on a new version that might lay the groundwork to provide custom equals methods without the need to modify the classes of the compared objects. But there is still a lot of work to do, before this version is ready to be released.

[toudidel]

It's strange because I have field of type java.util.Date in fact.
I workarounded it by type checking and in case of date type I compare two strings built from before and after date value.

[SQiShER]

Interesting, I would have sworn that Date works fine, but now that you say it I'm not sure anymore. I'll make sure to double-check before the next release. Good to hear that you found a workaround!

[yrodiere]

For the record, the implementation of Date.equals() only returns true when given an actual java.util.Date) as a parameter : it actually performs a test akin to other.getClass().equals(java.util.Date.class) instead of other instanceof Date.
This is an issue when working with ORMs, such as Hibernate for instance, which uses java.sql.Date and other subclasses of java.util.Date when retrieving entities from a database. In our team, we worked around this by comparing the timestamp (Date#getTime()) instead of the date itselft; maybe that's what you need, too?

[toudidel]

Yes, comparing timestamp may be also a good workaround.

[yrodiere]

Hi,

It seems you fixed it, thanks! Any idea when this could be included in a release?

[SQiShER]

I can put a new release on my to-do list for this week. 😃

[yrodiere]

That would be greatly appreciated :)