Groovy Temporal Support Continued

One area where ruby outshines groovy is in date and date time support. Ruby's date time support isn't more capable, just easier to use. Java, and groovy have Calendar--very complete, and very clunky. There is also joda time. Very complete, but a bit of an overkill for my tastes.

So here are the objectives:

• ability to add/subtract dates with integers representing days, months, etc.
• ability to subtract two dates to yield intervals representing days, hours, etc.
  
• ability to compare two dates
• ability to parse any type of date input, and most easily parse the standards
• ability to format dates in a wide variety of ways
  
• ability to create dates with integers and words like 10.days.ago or nextweek

Java's calendar class supports the first three requirements, parsing is available through SimpleDateFormat class. Groovy's TimeCategory enables some of the most common integer enhancements to create dates based on common temporal works. So, the pieces are in place, the next step is to wrap this in a groovy way.

DateTime, the Groovy Calendar: The first step is to create an easy (easier) to use, full featured DateTime class. One approach is to simply extend GregorianCalanedar and add the new methods, mostly getters and setters. That's were I started but soon discovered a better solution was to contain the calendar object, and use invokeMethod() to pass methods and arguments. Then, rather than define properties of the DateTime object, define getters and setters in bean style making the variables appear as if they were members. For example, I define these two methods:

int getYear() { return calendar.get(Calendar.YEAR) }
void setYear(int yr) { calendar.set(Calendar.YEAR, yr) }

Now, I can use short hand to access "year" like this:

def dateTime = new DateTime(year:2008)
assert dateTime.year == 2008
dateTime.year = 2020
assert dateTime.year == 2020
dateTime.year++
assert dateTime.year == 2021

Groovy, right? And adding other methods like setSeconds(), clearTime(), isWednesday() were easy one-liners to implement. I also took the liberty of shifting the month to 1..12 rather than 0..11, the calendar default.

Constructors: This was also very groovy. After I added the getter/setters, constructing with the virtual member vars was easy. So the DateTime class can be constructed like this:

dt = new DateTime(year:2020, month:4, day:1)
dt = new DateTime(hours:0, minutes:0, seconds:0)
dt = new DateTime().clearTime()
dt = new DateTime() + 5

Date/Time Formatting: The Rails group enhanced ruby's DateTime.to_s() method by adding formatting like this: to_s(format). This makes a lot of sense. To implement this I use a format hash that stores formatting strings by name. The map is static to enable use application wide (I may regret this later) and there is a default format member variable that controls how toString() is formatted. I also added toString(format) to display a date in multiple formats like this:

// default format is a modified ISO-8601 called 'db'
dt = new DateTime(year:2010, day:25, month:4, hours:15, minutes:35, seconds:29)
assert dt.toString() == '2010-04-25 15:35:29'
assert dt.toString(8601) == '2010-04-25T15:35:29-0800'
assert dt.toString('mdy') == '04/25/2010'
assert dt.toString('dmy') == '25.04.2010'
assert dt.toString('dMony') == '25-Apr-2010'

Other formats are available in the formats hash. The actual formatting is done using SimpleDateFormat that supplies a wide range of date formats and is compatible with Java 1.4, important in the groovy community.

A Groovy Date Parser: I've seen many approaches to this, usually making use of java's SimpleDateFormat class with a boat load of formats. I think there may be a better way. First, extracting the date parts, usually the numbers and constructing date time objects based on the numeric values. I'll discuss this implementation later...