Confused with Calendars and TimeZones

Question

Hi, I'll explain what I want to do. I have a table with several of what I call a "Time Ranges". Each Time Range has a day (day of week), beginTime and endTime. I also have different clients, each from a different country. Each client has a timezone associated (the format of this timezone is not defined just yet, but it should be something like -3, -4, +1, etc).
I want to get the current date, and be able to figure out if it is within a certain time range. For example, right now in Argentina is
11:48 AM GMT-3
This should match these time ranges:
11:00~12:00 | -3
10:00~11:00 | -4
13:00~14:00 | -1
And should not match this time range:
11:00~12:00 | -4
I'm trying to get the "current time for a certain time zone" with Calendar, and then be able to extract the time from that Calendar and compare it with my beginTime and endTime. I'm not getting anywhere.
Something like this:
Calendar cal = Calendar.getInstance(TimeZone.getTimeZone("GMT-08:00"));
System.out.println(cal.getTime());Is printing GMT-3 time. Please help.

Answer 1

manugarciac wrote:
Ok, I did it like this. The TimeRange Class has this method:
public boolean isActive(String timezone) {
Calendar cal = Calendar.getInstance(TimeZone.getTimeZone(timezone));
if (cal.get(Calendar.DAY_OF_WEEK) == this.day) {
Time time = new Time(cal.get(Calendar.HOUR_OF_DAY), cal.get(Calendar.MINUTE), 0);
return (beginTime == null || time.after(beginTime)) && (endTime == null || time.before(endTime));
return false;
}Timezone should come in this format: "GMT-04:00" and Time is java.sql.Time.
The only downside is that the Time constructor I used is deprecated. It says I should use the one that uses milliseconds since 1970. That kinda sucks, as I don't really care how much time passed since that time for this time. Any ideas of what I should use?forget java.sql.Time. use Calendar.set(int year, int month, int date, int hourOfDay, int minute) to set beginTime and endTime. use Calendar.compareTo(Calendar anotherCalendar) for the test.
Edited by: pete_d on Sep 10, 2010 3:09 PM
Not sure exactly what's going on in your TimeRange class but if the hour, minute, second and time zone in addition to the day of week (it seems that it does) for both begin and end time, then you can use this to create a Calendar instance to compare with the current time or to whatever other Calendar instance you want to check using its year, month day.