Date value passed to a web service

[the phantom]

Hi everyone,

I'm building an Android app and need to pass a date value into a web service. I've created a standard date variable that grabs the current date and time, then used the SimpleDateFormat method to convert it into a String of my desired format but then I need to convert that string back to a date object so it can be given to the web service.

I've tried the following however it doesn't convert utilDate into the desired format?;

java.util.Date utilDate = null;
Date rightNow = new Date();
String TodayDate;

SimpleDateFormat dateformatMddyyyy = new SimpleDateFormat("M-dd-yyyy");
StringBuilder nowMddyyyy = new StringBuilder( dateformatMddyyyy.format( rightNow ) );
TodayDate = nowMddyyyy.toString();
try {
utilDate = dateformatMddyyyy.parse(TodayDate);
} catch (ParseException e) {
// TODO Auto-generated catch block
e.printStackTrace();
}


I'm very new to Java so I appologise if there is a glaringly obvious way to do this!

[the phantom]

I've just discovered the sql.date variable which already creates the date in the format that I need but passing it to the web service produces an error that says 'Cannot Serialize' ?

Anyone know what that means?