Can some one help me with this date stuff

Question

Hello,
I wat to write a method that will take a date or a month and then return the time period
b4 that date or month..criteria would be like this..
if the pweriod is weekly then the enddate will be passed and it should return date that was 7 days
prior to the enddate. For e.g
enddate = 3 April 2002
the method should return
begindate = 27 March 2002
here is the method I am trying to work with...
what I am doing do far is a break down the date into integer values and then reconstruct the date again
...I am not being successful doing so..please take a look at my code and tell me what am I doing wrong
thanks
public static Date getBiginingOfPeriodDate(Date endDate){
Date beginDate = null;
Calendar calendar = Calendar.getInstance();
System.out.println("Date passed = "+endDate);
calendar.setTime(endDate);
int iDay = calendar.get(Calendar.DAY_OF_MONTH);
int iMon = calendar.get(Calendar.MONTH);
int iYr = calendar.get(Calendar.YEAR);
System.out.println("End date int values [ "+iDay+", "+iMon+", "+iYr);
calendar.set(iDay,iMon,iYr);
System.out.println("create end date from in values [ "+calendar.getTime()+" ]");
return beginDate;
}

Answer 1

If all you want to do is simple date arithmetic, such as subtracting 7 days from a date, just use the java.util.Calendar class, which provides methods (such as add) to do that for you. Don't "reinvent the wheel".