Java.Util.Date to Xmlgregoriancalendar

java.util.Date to XMLGregorianCalendar

I should like to take a step back and a modern look at this 10 years old question. The classes mentioned, Date and XMLGregorianCalendar, are old now. I challenge the use of them and offer alternatives.

Date was always poorly designed and is more than 20 years old. This is simple: don’t use it.
XMLGregorianCalendar is old too and has an old-fashioned design. As I understand it, it was used for producing dates and times in XML format for XML documents. Like 2009-05-07T19:05:45.678+02:00 or 2009-05-07T17:05:45.678Z. These formats agree well enough with ISO 8601 that the classes of java.time, the modern Java date and time API, can produce them, which we prefer.

No conversion necessary

For many (most?) purposes the modern replacement for a Date will be an Instant. An Instant is a point in time (just as a Date is).

    Instant yourInstant = // ...
    System.out.println(yourInstant);

An example output from this snippet:

2009-05-07T17:05:45.678Z

It’s the same as the latter of my example XMLGregorianCalendar strings above. As most of you know, it comes from Instant.toString being implicitly called by System.out.println. With java.time, in many cases we don’t need the conversions that in the old days we made between Date, Calendar, XMLGregorianCalendar and other classes (in some cases we do need conversions, though, I am showing you a couple in the next section).

Controlling the offset

Neither a Date nor in Instant has got a time zone nor a UTC offset. The previously accepted and still highest voted answer by Ben Noland uses the JVMs current default time zone for selecting the offset of the XMLGregorianCalendar. To include an offset in a modern object we use an OffsetDateTime. For example:

    ZoneId zone = ZoneId.of("America/Asuncion");
    OffsetDateTime dateTime = yourInstant.atZone(zone).toOffsetDateTime();
    System.out.println(dateTime);

2009-05-07T13:05:45.678-04:00

Again this conforms with XML format. If you want to use the current JVM time zone setting again, set zone to ZoneId.systemDefault().

What if I absolutely need an XMLGregorianCalendar?

There are more ways to convert Instant to XMLGregorianCalendar. I will present a couple, each with its pros and cons. First, just as an XMLGregorianCalendar produces a string like 2009-05-07T17:05:45.678Z, it can also be built from such a string:

    String dateTimeString = yourInstant.toString();
    XMLGregorianCalendar date2
            = DatatypeFactory.newInstance().newXMLGregorianCalendar(dateTimeString);
    System.out.println(date2);

2009-05-07T17:05:45.678Z

Pro: it’s short and I don’t think it gives any surprises. Con: To me it feels like a waste formatting the instant into a string and parsing it back.

    ZonedDateTime dateTime = yourInstant.atZone(zone);
    GregorianCalendar c = GregorianCalendar.from(dateTime);
    XMLGregorianCalendar date2 = DatatypeFactory.newInstance().newXMLGregorianCalendar(c);
    System.out.println(date2);

2009-05-07T13:05:45.678-04:00

Pro: It’s the official conversion. Controlling the offset comes naturally. Con: It goes through more steps and is therefore longer.

What if we got a Date?

If you got an old-fashioned Date object from a legacy API that you cannot afford to change just now, convert it to Instant:

    Instant i = yourDate.toInstant();
    System.out.println(i);

Output is the same as before:

2009-05-07T17:05:45.678Z

If you want to control the offset, convert further to an OffsetDateTime in the same way as above.

If you’ve got an old-fashioned Date and absolutely need an old-fashioned XMLGregorianCalendar, just use the answer by Ben Noland.

Convert date to XMLGregorianCalendar

You didn't mention anything about how the year is supposed to be represented in this date conversion, but here is some pseudocode to get you started. Note that I don't explicitly deal with the timezone in this example:

final DateFormat format = new SimpleDateFormat("E. M/d");
final String dateStr = "Thu. 03/01";
final Date date = format.parse(dateStr);

GregorianCalendar gregory = new GregorianCalendar();
gregory.setTime(date);

XMLGregorianCalendar calendar = DatatypeFactory.newInstance()
        .newXMLGregorianCalendar(
            gregory);

String date to xmlgregoriancalendar conversion

Found the solution as below.... posting it as it could help somebody else too :)

DateFormat format = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd hh:mm:ss");
Date date = format.parse("2014-04-24 11:15:00");

GregorianCalendar cal = new GregorianCalendar();
cal.setTime(date);

XMLGregorianCalendar xmlGregCal =  DatatypeFactory.newInstance().newXMLGregorianCalendar(cal);

System.out.println(xmlGregCal);

Output:

2014-04-24T11:15:00.000+02:00

Simple conversion between java.util.Date and XMLGregorianCalendar

Why not use an external binding file to tell XJC to generate java.util.Date fields instead of XMLGregorianCalendar?

Also see
How do I map xs:date to java.util.Date? Blog

convert XMLGregorianCalendar to date i.e MM/DD/YYYY hh:mm:ss AM

You can do this to return a Date:

calendar.toGregorianCalendar().getTime()

I found that code from this tutorial. From there, you can use a SimpleDateFormat to turn it into a string in the format you want.

But, if you're using JDBC to save the date in the database, you probably can pass in the Date directly with this method:

preparedStatement.setDate(colNum, myDate);

Date to XMLGregorianCalendar with specific format

You can do it by the date object itself:

String formattedDate = sdf.format(categoryData.getBulkCollectionTime()); //yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss
convertStringToXmlGregorian(formattedDate);

public XMLGregorianCalendar convertStringToXmlGregorian(String dateString)
{
      try {
            Date date = sdf.parse(dateString);
            GregorianCalendar gc = (GregorianCalendar) GregorianCalendar.getInstance();
            gc.setTime(date);
            return DatatypeFactory.newInstance().newXMLGregorianCalendar(gc);
        } catch (ParseException e) {
            // Optimize exception handling
            System.out.print(e.getMessage());
            return null;
        } 

}

Java.Util.Date to Xmlgregoriancalendar