[jboss-user] [JBossWS] - Best Practices for Dates

awhitford do-not-reply at jboss.com
Sat Nov 22 16:20:23 EST 2008


I have a web service that returns Dates.  Imagine something simple like:


  | @WebMethod
  | Date getCurrentBusinessDate()
  | 

In this case, I am only interested in a Date (not a Time or Date Time).  This is by design because otherwise one might go down the road of considering Time Zones, etc. -- and that is not necessary for this case.

When running something like this, we see a full date/time appear in the SOAP result. Sure, the time is zero/midnight, but it also mentions a time zone (which really shouldn't be there, but seems to be impossible to get rid of).

By rights, I really only want to see a Date transmitted (like YYYY-MM-DD).  In JPA, for example, I use a Date type but qualify it with a @Temporal annotation to clarify the TemporalType (Date, Time, DateTime).  I see that JAXB has similar distinctions (xsd:date, xsd:time, xsd:dateTime).

Is there a way to annotate the web method so the return value is clarified to be an xsd:date?


Secondly...  Is there a material difference between using java.util.Date vs. java.util.Calendar?  (Is one really preferred over the other?)  If I am writing Java-first Web Services, should I be using Date or Calendar to represent dates?


Thanks for your help!

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