Turning a string into a java.util.Date, and catching exceptions?

Ignition
1

I have a application that uses a formatted text field for users to input dates, and that part is a must have so I cannot change it.

I want to be able to check if the date is a valid date (ie no 2020-02-39) and if it is, pass it on to the next part of my application as a java.util.Date object, and if not raise an exception.

I have this

from java.text import SimpleDateFormat
...
inputFormat = SimpleDateFormat('yyyy-MM-dd')
dt = data['date']
dateOut = SimpleDateFormat(inputFormat, dt)

But this does not seem to be working as expected. The formatted input box is yyyy-MM-dd and will have two values for the day always. Any insight as to whats going wrong?

2 
from datetime import datetime
def checkDate(date_text):
    try:
        if date_text != datetime.strptime(date_text, "%Y-%d-%m").strftime('%Y-%d-%m'):
            raise ValueError
        return True
    except ValueError:
        return False
        
print checkDate(event.source.parent.getComponent('Text Field').text)
3

Is there a compelling reason to not use system.date.parse for this?

1 Like
4

Nope that was it. I had tried the datetime method but that left me with a python date object when I needed a java date object. I had forgotten about system.date but its good to know it works with java date objects.

This does just coerce things like 2020-02-47 to 2020-03-18 which isn’t great for my needs but at least I have the right object type now. I can code that error checking manually if need be.a