How to format XMLGregorianCalendar

Recently, I encountered an problem with formatting the date for a SOAP Web Service.

Description

When xs:dateTime is used to define a date or datetime field for an SOAP Web Service, wsimport tool will use in Java client classes XMLGregorianCalendar object and the default formatting for XMLGregorianCalendar object is yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss.SSSXXX. My service needed the date formatted without milliseconds and timezone. There are several options to do this. Here are 2 of them.

Option 1

Using SimpleDateFormat class and pass the date in string format.

String FORMATER = "yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss";
		
DateFormat format = new SimpleDateFormat(FORMATER);
		
Date date = new Date();
XMLGregorianCalendar gDateFormatted1 =
	DatatypeFactory.newInstance().newXMLGregorianCalendar(format.format(date));

Option 2

Passing the all the date component separately and use DatatypeConstants.FIELD_UNDEFINED for timezone and milliseconds parameters.

Calendar cal = Calendar.getInstance();
XMLGregorianCalendar gDateFormatted2 =
	DatatypeFactory.newInstance().newXMLGregorianCalendar(
		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),
		cal.get(Calendar.SECOND), DatatypeConstants.FIELD_UNDEFINED, DatatypeConstants.FIELD_UNDEFINED);

Full Example

package com.admfactory;

import java.text.DateFormat;
import java.text.SimpleDateFormat;
import java.util.Calendar;
import java.util.Date;
import java.util.GregorianCalendar;

import javax.xml.datatype.DatatypeConstants;
import javax.xml.datatype.DatatypeFactory;
import javax.xml.datatype.XMLGregorianCalendar;

public class XMLGregorianCalendarFormatter {
	
	public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
		System.out.println("XMLGregorianCalendar Formatter tutorial");
		System.out.println();
		
		GregorianCalendar gCal = new GregorianCalendar();
		gCal.setTime(new Date());
		XMLGregorianCalendar gDateUnformated = DatatypeFactory.newInstance().newXMLGregorianCalendar(gCal);
		System.out.println("Unformatted date: " + gDateUnformated);	
		System.out.println();
				
		String FORMATER = "yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss";
		
		DateFormat format = new SimpleDateFormat(FORMATER);
		
		Date date = new Date();
		XMLGregorianCalendar gDateFormatted1 =
			DatatypeFactory.newInstance().newXMLGregorianCalendar(format.format(date));
		System.out.println("Formatted using SimpleDateFormat: " + gDateFormatted1.toString());
		
		
		Calendar cal = Calendar.getInstance();
		XMLGregorianCalendar gDateFormatted2 =
			DatatypeFactory.newInstance().newXMLGregorianCalendar(
				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),
				cal.get(Calendar.SECOND), DatatypeConstants.FIELD_UNDEFINED, DatatypeConstants.FIELD_UNDEFINED);
		System.out.println("Formatted using FIELD_UNDEFINED:  " + gDateFormatted2);
	}
}

Output

XMLGregorianCalendar Formatter tutorial

Unformatted date: 2016-05-10T10:23:06.510+01:00

Formatted using SimpleDateFormat: 2016-05-10T10:23:06
Formatted using FIELD_UNDEFINED:  2016-05-10T10:23:06

Conclusions

This is a simple solution to format the XMLGregorianCalendar output if you need to remove last 2 fields. If you want to avoid using it and convert to Date or Calendar, you need to use the bindings and create a Java class to handle the conversion. For more information about date formatting, follow the How to get date and time in Java tutorial.

References

• XMLGregorianCalendar
• SimpleDateFormat
• How to get date and time in Java