Joda-Time set date object based on age

Question

I am trying to write test cases for a certain class. I want to set the test user's age to a certain value but I don't want to have to deal with the age calculation and/or making the junit test case time-independent, which I know how to do thanks to @SkinnyJ from my earlier post.

So is there a way to do something like:

LocalDate birthday = new LocalDate(72Y3M);

72 years and 3 months old being the desired age of the user. And then joda-time would take that number and calculate what his/her birthday should be to be that age and return that date. So in this case birthday would be October 8, 1943.

Attempt 1:

public LocalDate setUsersAge(int years, int months, int days) {
    LocalDate birthday = new LocalDate();
    birthday.minusYears(years);
    birthday.minusMonths(months);
    birthday.minusDays(days);

    return birthday
}

Attempt 2:

public LocalDate setUsersAge(int years, int months, int days) {
    Period age = new Period();
    age.withYears(years);
    age.withMonths(months);
    age.withDays(days);

    return birthday.minus(age);
}

While both way get the job done, I just don't like how the code looks. Is there a much cleaner way to do this?

Answer 1

I think this is a fairly clean way of achieving your objective:

public LocalDate setUsersAge(int years, int months, int days) {
    return LocalDate.now().minusYears(years).minusMonths(months).minusDays(days);
}

EDIT: Thanks to the comment from Basil Bourque, if you are worried about issues with timeZone, you can do the following:

    public LocalDate setUsersAge(int years, int months, int days, DateTimeZone timeZone) {
        return LocalDate.now(timeZone).minusYears(years).minusMonths(months).minusDays(days);
}