HTML form Date field - what's the best way to capture it on the backend?

Question

Hi,
What would be a good way to capture a text field that contains a date string?
In my app I have a page with several text fields, that are populated by a calendar pop-up. On the server side I can capture them into a java.util.Date object, but Date is dperecated.
Should I still use Date or is there a better way?
I intend to use the date as part of an SQL query.
Thanks.

Answer 1

The class java.util.Date is not itself deprecated, however several of its methods are.
For converting string -> date, you should use the class java.text.SimpleDateFormat. That allows you to specify format strings such as MM-dd-yyyy hh:mm:ss for converting date -> string -> date.
If you are wanting to set day/month/year on the date object directly, instead of the Date methods setDay, setMonth, setYear, you should instead use the java.util.Calender class:
calendar.set(Calendar.MONTH, 4);
The calendar can then be converted to a Date object by calling calendar.getTime().
If you are going to use the date as part of a sql query, I would recommend using a Prepared statement, and the java.sql.Date/java.sql.Timestamp class as well.
To convert from java.util.Date to java.sql.Date)
jva.util.Date utilDate = Calendar.getInstance().getTime();
java.sql.Date sqlDate = new java.sql.Date(utilDate.getTime());cheers,
evnafets