Convert timestamp long to normal date format

Question

In my web app, date & time of a user's certain activity is stored(in database) as a timestamp Long which on being displayed back to user needs to be converted into normal date/time format.

(Actually my database Cassandra stores the timestamp of when a column was written to it, as a long value( microseconds since 1970 ) which I will use to find out the time of that corresponding user activity)

I am using JSF 2.0(+ primefaces) which I believe has converters that may be helpful for this conversion? Or otherwise how How can I, at best, achieve these conversions?

Answer 1

Let me propose this solution for you. So in your managed bean, do this

public String convertTime(long time){
    Date date = new Date(time);
    Format format = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy MM dd HH:mm:ss");
    return format.format(date);
}

so in your JSF page, you can do this (assuming foo is the object that contain your time)

<h:dataTable value="#{myBean.convertTime(myBean.foo.time)}" />

If you have multiple pages that want to utilize this method, you can put this in an abstract class and have your managed bean extend this abstract class.

EDIT: Return time with TimeZone

unfortunately, I think SimpleDateFormat will always format the time in local time, so we can't use SimpleDateFormat anymore. So to display time in different TimeZone, we can do this

public String convertTimeWithTimeZome(long time){
    Calendar cal = Calendar.getInstance();
    cal.setTimeZone(TimeZone.getTimeZone("UTC"));
    cal.setTimeInMillis(time);
    return (cal.get(Calendar.YEAR) + " " + (cal.get(Calendar.MONTH) + 1) + " " 
            + cal.get(Calendar.DAY_OF_MONTH) + " " + cal.get(Calendar.HOUR_OF_DAY) + ":"
            + cal.get(Calendar.MINUTE));

}

A better solution is to utilize JodaTime. In my opinion, this API is much better than Calendar (lighter weight, faster and provide more functionality). Plus Calendar.Month of January is 0, that force developer to add 1 to the result, and you have to format the time yourself. Using JodaTime, you can fix all of that. Correct me if I am wrong, but I think JodaTime is incorporated in JDK7

Answer 2

java.time

    ZoneId usersTimeZone = ZoneId.of("Asia/Tashkent");
    Locale usersLocale = Locale.forLanguageTag("ga-IE");
    DateTimeFormatter formatter = DateTimeFormatter.ofLocalizedDateTime(FormatStyle.MEDIUM)
            .withLocale(usersLocale);

    long microsSince1970 = 1_512_345_678_901_234L;
    long secondsSince1970 = TimeUnit.MICROSECONDS.toSeconds(microsSince1970);
    long remainingMicros = microsSince1970 - TimeUnit.SECONDS.toMicros(secondsSince1970);
    ZonedDateTime dateTime = Instant.ofEpochSecond(secondsSince1970, 
                    TimeUnit.MICROSECONDS.toNanos(remainingMicros))
            .atZone(usersTimeZone);
    String dateTimeInUsersFormat = dateTime.format(formatter);
    System.out.println(dateTimeInUsersFormat);

The above snippet prints:

4 Noll 2017 05:01:18

“Noll” is Gaelic for December, so this should make your user happy. Except there may be very few Gaelic speaking people living in Tashkent, so please specify the user’s correct time zone and locale yourself.

I am taking seriously that you got microseconds from your database. If second precision is fine, you can do without remainingMicros and just use the one-arg Instant.ofEpochSecond(), which will make the code a couple of lines shorter. Since Instant and ZonedDateTime do support nanosecond precision, I found it most correct to keep the full precision of your timestamp. If your timestamp was in milliseconds rather than microseconds (which they often are), you may just use Instant.ofEpochMilli().

The answers using Date, Calendar and/or SimpleDateFormat were fine when this question was asked 7 years ago. Today those classes are all long outdated, and we have so much better in java.time, the modern Java date and time API.

For most uses I recommend you use the built-in localized formats as I do in the code. You may experiment with passing SHORT, LONG or FULL for format style. Yo may even specify format style for the date and for the time of day separately using an overloaded ofLocalizedDateTime method. If a specific format is required (this was asked in a duplicate question), you can have that:

    DateTimeFormatter formatter = DateTimeFormatter.ofPattern("HH:mm:ss, dd/MM/uuuu");

Using this formatter instead we get

05:01:18, 04/12/2017

Link: Oracle tutorial: Date Time explaining how to use java.time.

Answer 3

Not sure if JSF provides a built-in functionality, but you could use java.sql.Date's constructor to convert to a date object: http://download.oracle.com/javase/1.5.0/docs/api/java/sql/Date.html#Date(long)

Then you should be able to use higher level features provided by Java SE, Java EE to display and format the extracted date. You could instantiate a java.util.Calendar and explicitly set the time: http://download.oracle.com/javase/1.5.0/docs/api/java/util/Calendar.html#setTime(java.util.Date)

EDIT: The JSF components should not take care of the conversion. Your data access layer (persistence layer) should take care of this. In other words, your JSF components should not handle the long typed attributes but only a Date or Calendar typed attributes.

Answer 4

To show leading zeros infront of hours, minutes and seconds use below modified code. The trick here is we are converting (or more accurately formatting) integer into string so that it shows leading zero whenever applicable :

public String convertTimeWithTimeZome(long time) {
        Calendar cal = Calendar.getInstance();
        cal.setTimeZone(TimeZone.getTimeZone("UTC"));
        cal.setTimeInMillis(time);
        String curTime = String.format("%02d:%02d:%02d", cal.get(Calendar.HOUR_OF_DAY), cal.get(Calendar.MINUTE), cal.get(Calendar.SECOND));
        return curTime;
    }

Result would be like : 00:01:30

Answer 5

I tried this and worked for me.

Date = (long)(DateTime.Now.Subtract(new DateTime(1970, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0))).TotalSeconds