How to identify the object type in xpress

Question

In ui global.startdate is evalued with Date object type when use display class as DatePicker. After save, the global.startdate is String type. The other place in the code has use this global.startdate to convert to special date string. The problem is how to detect what data type the global.startdate is at one particular moment?

Answer 1

In my case I do the following.
1. Use the following rule to display the date in the desired format.
<invoke name='dateToString' class='com.waveset.util.Util'>
<ref>inputdate</ref>
<s>MM-dd-yyyy</s>
</invoke>
At any point in time if one wants to know, one explicity needs to convert the java.util.Date obtained from datepicker using dateToString method in the Util class.
2. When one wants to insert the date into the database then the following can be done.
     // First Convert the dates into appropriate formats
     SimpleDateFormat formater = new SimpleDateFormat("mm-dd-yyyy");
     java.sql.Date _startDate     = null;
     if(startdate != null) {
          java.util.Date parsedDate = formater.parse(startdate, new ParsePosition(0));
          _startDate = new java.sql.Date(parsedDate.getTime());
          System.out.println("_startDate::::"+_startDate);
     }