java.util.Date to XMLGregorianCalendar

Isn't there a convenient way of getting from a java.util.Date to a XMLGregorianCalendar?

GregorianCalendar c = new GregorianCalendar();
c.setTime(yourDate);
XMLGregorianCalendar date2 = DatatypeFactory.newInstance().newXMLGregorianCalendar(c);

For those that might end up here looking for the opposite conversion (from XMLGregorianCalendar to Date):

XMLGregorianCalendar xcal = <assume this is initialized>;
java.util.Date dt = xcal.toGregorianCalendar().getTime();

I should like to take a step back and a modern look at this 10 years old question. The classes mentioned, Date and XMLGregorianCalendar, are old now. I challenge the use of them and offer alternatives.

• Date was always poorly designed and is more than 20 years old. This is simple: don’t use it.
• XMLGregorianCalendar is old too and has an old-fashioned design. As I understand it, it was used for producing dates and times in XML format for XML documents. Like 2009-05-07T19:05:45.678+02:00 or 2009-05-07T17:05:45.678Z. These formats agree well enough with ISO 8601 that the classes of java.time, the modern Java date and time API, can produce them, which we prefer.

No conversion necessary

For many (most?) purposes the modern replacement for a Date will be an Instant. An Instant is a point in time (just as a Date is).

	Instant yourInstant = // ...
	System.out.println(yourInstant);

An example output from this snippet:

> 2009-05-07T17:05:45.678Z

It’s the same as the latter of my example XMLGregorianCalendar strings above. As most of you know, it comes from Instant.toString being implicitly called by System.out.println. With java.time, in many cases we don’t need the conversions that in the old days we made between Date, Calendar, XMLGregorianCalendar and other classes (in some cases we do need conversions, though, I am showing you a couple in the next section).

Controlling the offset

Neither a Date nor in Instant has got a time zone nor a UTC offset. The previously accepted and still highest voted answer by Ben Noland uses the JVMs current default time zone for selecting the offset of the XMLGregorianCalendar. To include an offset in a modern object we use an OffsetDateTime. For example:

	ZoneId zone = ZoneId.of("America/Asuncion");
	OffsetDateTime dateTime = yourInstant.atZone(zone).toOffsetDateTime();
	System.out.println(dateTime);

> 2009-05-07T13:05:45.678-04:00

Again this conforms with XML format. If you want to use the current JVM time zone setting again, set zone to ZoneId.systemDefault().

What if I absolutely need an XMLGregorianCalendar?

There are more ways to convert Instant to XMLGregorianCalendar. I will present a couple, each with its pros and cons. First, just as an XMLGregorianCalendar produces a string like 2009-05-07T17:05:45.678Z, it can also be built from such a string:

	String dateTimeString = yourInstant.toString();
	XMLGregorianCalendar date2
			= DatatypeFactory.newInstance().newXMLGregorianCalendar(dateTimeString);
	System.out.println(date2);

> 2009-05-07T17:05:45.678Z

Pro: it’s short and I don’t think it gives any surprises. Con: To me it feels like a waste formatting the instant into a string and parsing it back.

	ZonedDateTime dateTime = yourInstant.atZone(zone);
	GregorianCalendar c = GregorianCalendar.from(dateTime);
	XMLGregorianCalendar date2 = DatatypeFactory.newInstance().newXMLGregorianCalendar(c);
	System.out.println(date2);

> 2009-05-07T13:05:45.678-04:00

Pro: It’s the official conversion. Controlling the offset comes naturally. Con: It goes through more steps and is therefore longer.

What if we got a Date?

If you got an old-fashioned Date object from a legacy API that you cannot afford to change just now, convert it to Instant:

	Instant i = yourDate.toInstant();
	System.out.println(i);

Output is the same as before:

> 2009-05-07T17:05:45.678Z

If you want to control the offset, convert further to an OffsetDateTime in the same way as above.

If you’ve got an old-fashioned Date and absolutely need an old-fashioned XMLGregorianCalendar, just use the answer by Ben Noland.

Links

• Oracle tutorial: Date Time explaining how to use java.time.
• XSD Date and Time Data Types on W3Schools.
• Wikipedia article: ISO 8601

Here is a method for converting from a GregorianCalendar to XMLGregorianCalendar; I'll leave the part of converting from a java.util.Date to GregorianCalendar as an exercise for you:

import java.util.GregorianCalendar;

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

public class DateTest {

   public static void main(final String[] args) throws Exception {
      GregorianCalendar gcal = new GregorianCalendar();
      XMLGregorianCalendar xgcal = DatatypeFactory.newInstance()
            .newXMLGregorianCalendar(gcal);
      System.out.println(xgcal);
   }

}

EDIT: Slooow :-)

A one line example using Joda-Time library:

XMLGregorianCalendar xgc = DatatypeFactory.newInstance().newXMLGregorianCalendar(new DateTime().toGregorianCalendar());

Credit to Nicolas Mommaerts from his comment in the accepted answer.

Just thought I'd add my solution below, since the answers above did not meet my exact needs. My Xml schema required seperate Date and Time elements, not a singe DateTime field. The standard XMLGregorianCalendar constructor used above will generate a DateTime field

Note there a couple of gothca's, such as having to add one to the month (since java counts months from 0).

GregorianCalendar cal = new GregorianCalendar();
cal.setTime(yourDate);
XMLGregorianCalendar xmlDate = DatatypeFactory.newInstance().newXMLGregorianCalendarDate(cal.get(Calendar.YEAR), cal.get(Calendar.MONTH)+1, cal.get(Calendar.DAY_OF_MONTH), 0);
XMLGregorianCalendar xmlTime = DatatypeFactory.newInstance().newXMLGregorianCalendarTime(cal.get(Calendar.HOUR_OF_DAY), cal.get(Calendar.MINUTE), cal.get(Calendar.SECOND), 0);

I hope my encoding here is right ;D To make it faster just use the ugly getInstance() call of GregorianCalendar instead of constructor call:

import java.util.GregorianCalendar;
import javax.xml.datatype.DatatypeFactory;
import javax.xml.datatype.XMLGregorianCalendar;

public class DateTest {

   public static void main(final String[] args) throws Exception {
      // do not forget the type cast :/
      GregorianCalendar gcal = (GregorianCalendar) GregorianCalendar.getInstance();
      XMLGregorianCalendar xgcal = DatatypeFactory.newInstance()
            .newXMLGregorianCalendar(gcal);
      System.out.println(xgcal);
   }

}

Assuming you are decoding or encoding xml and using JAXB, then it's possible to replace the dateTime binding entirely and use something else than `XMLGregorianCalendar' for every date in the schema.

In that way you can have JAXB do the repetitive stuff while you can spend the time on writing awesome code that delivers value.

Example for a jodatime DateTime: (Doing this with java.util.Date would also work - but with certain limitations. I prefer jodatime and it's copied from my code so I know it works...)

<jxb:globalBindings>
	<jxb:javaType name="org.joda.time.LocalDateTime" xmlType="xs:dateTime"
		parseMethod="test.util.JaxbConverter.parseDateTime"
		printMethod="se.seb.bis.test.util.JaxbConverter.printDateTime" />
	<jxb:javaType name="org.joda.time.LocalDate" xmlType="xs:date"
		parseMethod="test.util.JaxbConverter.parseDate"
		printMethod="test.util.JaxbConverter.printDate" />
	<jxb:javaType name="org.joda.time.LocalTime" xmlType="xs:time"
		parseMethod="test.util.JaxbConverter.parseTime"
		printMethod="test.util.JaxbConverter.printTime" />
	<jxb:serializable uid="2" />
</jxb:globalBindings>

And the converter:

public class JaxbConverter {
static final DateTimeFormatter dtf = ISODateTimeFormat.dateTimeNoMillis();
static final DateTimeFormatter df = ISODateTimeFormat.date();
static final DateTimeFormatter tf = ISODateTimeFormat.time();

public static LocalDateTime parseDateTime(String s) {
	try {
		if (StringUtils.trimToEmpty(s).isEmpty())
			return null;
		LocalDateTime r = dtf.parseLocalDateTime(s);
		return r;
	} catch (Exception e) {
		throw new IllegalArgumentException(e);
	}
}

public static String printDateTime(LocalDateTime d) {
	try {
		if (d == null)
			return null;
		return dtf.print(d);
	} catch (Exception e) {
		throw new IllegalArgumentException(e);
	}
}

public static LocalDate parseDate(String s) {
	try {
		if (StringUtils.trimToEmpty(s).isEmpty())
			return null;
		return df.parseLocalDate(s);
	} catch (Exception e) {
		throw new IllegalArgumentException(e);
	}
}

public static String printDate(LocalDate d) {
	try {
		if (d == null)
			return null;
		return df.print(d);
	} catch (Exception e) {
		throw new IllegalArgumentException(e);
	}
}

public static String printTime(LocalTime d) {
	try {
		if (d == null)
			return null;
		return tf.print(d);
	} catch (Exception e) {
		throw new IllegalArgumentException(e);
	}
}

public static LocalTime parseTime(String s) {
	try {
		if (StringUtils.trimToEmpty(s).isEmpty())
			return null;
		return df.parseLocalTime(s);
	} catch (Exception e) {
		throw new IllegalArgumentException(e);
	}
}

See here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11109608/how-replace-xmlgregoriancalendar-by-date

If you are happy to just map to an instant based on the timezone+timestamp, and the original timezone is not really relevant, then java.util.Date is probably fine too.

Check out this code :-

/* Create Date Object */
Date date = new Date();
XMLGregorianCalendar xmlDate = null;
GregorianCalendar gc = new GregorianCalendar();

gc.setTime(date);
     
try{
    xmlDate = DatatypeFactory.newInstance().newXMLGregorianCalendar(gc);
}
catch(Exception e){
    e.printStackTrace();
}
         
System.out.println("XMLGregorianCalendar :- " + xmlDate);
         
 

You can see complete example here

My solution

public static XMLGregorianCalendar DateToXMLGregorianCalendar(Date date) {

    GregorianCalendar gregoriancalendar = new GregorianCalendar();
    gregoriancalendar.setTime(date);
    XMLGregorianCalendar xmlGregorianCalendar = new XMLGregorianCalendarImpl(gregoriancalendar);
    return xmlGregorianCalendar;
}