Web Service from WSDL & XMLGregorianCalendar Issues

[CoAstroGeek]

Hi folks,
Java newbie here, so don't discount the obvious answers!

I'm trying to create a web service to expose some orf our data. I wrote an XML schema & WSDL using the NetBeans tools, and then generated a web service from them. It's working well - except for an issue on the dates.

The XML schema (SatcatRecord.xsd) returned by the service includes several dates, which I cleverly chose to represent with the xsd:date type, as such:

 <xsd:element name="LaunchDate" type="xsd:date"/>

Netbeans generates a class wrapping this XSD with all the needed getters & setters. With lots of extra stuff removed, it looks something like this...

SatcatRecord.java

public class SatcatRecord {
    @XmlElement(name = "LaunchDate", required = true)
    @XmlSchemaType(name = "date")
    protected XMLGregorianCalendar launchDate;

    public XMLGregorianCalendar getLaunchDate() {
        return launchDate;
    }

    public void setLaunchDate(XMLGregorianCalendar value) {
        this.launchDate = value;
    }
}

I then implement the guts of the function which involves retrieving the data from the database and populating the SatcatRecord object.

First question ... how do you declare/instantiate the XMLGregorianCalendar object??
I have something like this:

XMLGregorianCalendar gregDate;
gregDate = DatatypeFactory.newInstance().newXMLGregorianCalendar();

I really don't know that that 2nd line is doing - I found it via a code search on google, but it seems to do the job.

Now I populate the gregDate object. Just take this simple example:

gregDate.setYear(1969);
gregDate.setMonth(7);
gregDate.setDay(16);

I then use this value to populate the LaunchDate member of SatcatRecord as such:

org.netbeans.xml.schema.satcat.SatcatRecord record;
record = new org.netbeans.xml.schema.satcat.SatcatRecord();
record.setLaunchDate(gregDate);

When I go to test the service, I end up with the following in the output record:

<ns3:LaunchDate>0001-02-05</ns3:LaunchDate>

???
But the gregDate object seems to be populated correctly - if I instead stuff the string representation into a string field in the same structure:

                 record.setCountry(gregDate.toString());
or
                 record.setCountry(gregDate.toXMLFormat());

I get the expected output:

<ns3:Country>1969-07-16T00:00:00</ns3:Country>

So ... why isn't my XMLGregorianDate object being properly translated into the date field in the returned XML?

A few things I've tried...
Tried making the LaunchDate field in the XML schema a dateTime type instead of just date - same result.

Checked the XMLGregorianDate copy-constructor ... seems to be behaving properly.

Not sure where to go from here - any suggestions are welcome!

Oh ... FWIW:
Netbeans IDE 6.1
Sun Java Applications Server 9.1_02
All running on a 32bit Fedora Core 5 system.

[ian_scho]

It's not something to do with the fact that it's before 1970, is it? You'll get a negative long value for 1969.

http-->//java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/docs/api/java/util/Date.html#Date(long)

[RogerP]

Probably you solved it by now. If not, is this what you want?

/*
 * DateConverter.java
 *
 * Created on 30 March 2007, 17:02
 *
 * To change this template, choose Tools | Template Manager
 * and open the template in the editor.
 */

package xyz;

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

/**
 *
 * @author RogerP
 */
public class DateConverter {
    protected Date date;
    /** Creates a new instance of DateConverter */
    public DateConverter() {
    }
    public DateConverter(XMLGregorianCalendar xmlGregorianCalendar) {
        
        GregorianCalendar dateGreg = xmlGregorianCalendar.toGregorianCalendar();
        this.date = dateGreg.getTime();
        
    }
    
}