Get date difference in jstl

Question

I have a date and want to show difference of it with current time as --year--month--days--hours--minutes--seconds. How can I do this jstl? It is sure that the date will be greater than current datetime.

José Andias · Answer 1 · 2015-01-14T12:26:43.207

Using JSTL you could do some code gymnastics like:

<jsp:useBean id="now" class="java.util.Date" />
<fmt:parseNumber
    value="${(now.time - otherDate.time) / (1000*60*60*24) }"
    integerOnly="true" /> day(s) passed between given dates.

But as code suggests, this gives overall difference and hardly could be a "calendar aware" way of doing it. I.e. You could not say: "3 years, 1 month and 2 days passed since otherDate".

Another example for this "days passed..." style, using a JSP tag and using "today/yesterday/days back" presentation:

<%--[...]--%>
<%@attribute name="otherDate" required="true" type="java.util.Date"%>

<jsp:useBean id="now" class="java.util.Date" scope="request"/>
<fmt:parseNumber
    value="${ now.time / (1000*60*60*24) }"
    integerOnly="true" var="nowDays" scope="request"/>

<fmt:parseNumber
    value="${ otherDate.time / (1000*60*60*24) }"
    integerOnly="true" var="otherDays" scope="page"/>

<c:set value="${nowDays - otherDays}" var="dateDiff"/>
<c:choose>
    <c:when test="${dateDiff eq 0}">today</c:when>
    <c:when test="${dateDiff eq 1}">yesterday</c:when>
    <c:otherwise>${dateDiff} day(s) ago</c:otherwise>
<%--[...]--%>

Note:

In your software problem domain, if it makes sense to talk about days and months in a calendar way, probably you should have that expressed in your Domain Model. If not, at least you should benefit from using another lower software layer to provide this information (and for example using java.util.Calendar or Joda-Time APIs).

I got an issue saying " Property 'time' not found on type java.lang.String". — MR AND, Jul 11 '19 at 19:44
Makes sense since `time` is not a property of `String`. In the response code snippets, only `otherDate` type on first snippet is defined elsewhere. Other applications of `time` are given a type. — José Andias, Jul 13 '19 at 12:25

score 0 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:33

0

Not sure there are any built in ways of doing this with JSTL. you could write your own tag library or potentially use expression language (EL) like below.

${(dateObj) - (now.time)}

taken from Looking for JSTL Taglib calculate seconds between two dates

edited May 23 '17 at 12:33

Community

1
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answered Jan 26 '12 at 09:18

olly_uk

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score 0 · Answer 3 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:06

Mark I'm uncertain if this is possible using JSTL and one way would be to create your own custom tag to handle this as @olly_uk suggested. Me personally would not use any expression language on my JSP as this might also affect readability and not best practise.

You could also have this calculation/date difference when your page bean is constructed, that way avoiding any EL or a new tag. This also might have its limitations such as I'm not sure if the date you want to check the difference is entered by the user on field where you want to display the result instantly etc if you see what I mean.

Also another you could try depending on your scenario is using jQuery to calculate and display the difference, I thought I'll link this page anyway from SO.

How do I get the number of days between two dates in JavaScript?

JQuery Calculate Day Difference in 2 date textboxes

Hope this helps.

Get date difference in jstl

3 Answers3