Cannot set date to '11-March-2012 2am' using af:inputDate

Question

In my use case I need to accept GMT dates for one of my fields (TIME_OF_DEPARTURE) but I've been running into the following issues:
First, my local timeZone is EST where this date is not valid, based on some entries in this forum I went ahead and configured my application's timeZone as GMT where 2am on 3/11/2012 is perfectly valid. I made the following changes:
- added -Duser.timezone=GMT to the project's properties:
- META-INF/adf-config.xml
- and trinidad-config.xml
- af:convertDateTime.timeZone
The calendar popup hovever doesn't seem to accept this value. If I type in the value though it works.
What else do I have to do for the calendar popup to work? I'm printing out the adfContext.timeZone.ID value in the page where this is happening and I can see the desired timeZone to be active.
The second issue is that as I mentioned before I only want to do this for a single field and not for the entire application. My first attempt to address this was by using af:convertDate.timeZone but that didn't help. I had then to start making changes to configuration files I mentioned above and that affects every single page in my app. How can I address this on a field-by-field basis?
Any guidance is greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
MV

Answer 1

The format mask "dd-MMM-yyyy HH24mm" does not correspond to the literal "11-March-2012 2am". Try the mask "dd-MMMM-yyyy ha" instead ("MMMM" interprets the month as text but not a number, while "MMM" interprets it as a roman number, "h" corresponds to 1-12 hour, "a" corresponds to the AM/PM specifier). If you need the time portion in a 24-hour notation with minutes, then use the format mask "dd-MMMM-yyyy HH:mm".
Please, have a look here for information about the Java date format specifiers:
http://docs.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/text/SimpleDateFormat.html
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