Stuck on testing a method

Question

I am doing some table testing in word, all of the JUnits are done but i am having trouble testing a method - as i am the tester in this project and not the coder i am struggling to understand what is actually correct or not

   public GregorianCalendar calcDeparture(String date, String time) {
        String[] calDate = new String[3];
        String[] calTime = new String[2];
        calDate[0] = (date.substring(0, 2)); //Dat
        calDate[1] = date.substring(2, 5); //Month
        calDate[2] = "20" + date.substring(5, 7); //Year
        calTime = time.split(":");

        //Adds the year, month and day and hour and minute from the above splited arrays
        int year = Integer.parseInt(calDate[2]);
        int month = monthToInt(calDate[1]);
        int day = Integer.parseInt(calDate[0]);
        int hour = Integer.parseInt(calTime[0]);
        int minute = Integer.parseInt(calTime[1]);

        GregorianCalendar newDeparture = new GregorianCalendar(year, month, day, hour, minute, 0);
        return newDeparture;
    }

This is the method I am testing. If i pass it the values of "01AUG07 "14:40" i get a gregorian calander back but i don't know if the values inside of it are correct so i can't tick the passed or failed box. What i get back in the BlueJ object inspector is a load of really long numbers :D

can i get some help please

thanks

Answer 1

Why can you just not use the standard getters to check the individual fields, along the lines of:

Calendar cal = calcDeparture("01AUG07", "14:40");
if (cal.get(Calendar.YEAR) != 2007) { ... }

Answer 2

1. BlueJ? Consider using an IDE, not an educational software
2. The method is terribly written - working with dates using a strictly-formatted String is wrong.

3. Calendar (which is the supertype of GregorianCalendar) has the get method, which you can use like:

   Calendar calendar = calcDeparture(yourDate, yourTime);
   int day = calendar.get(Calendar.DAY_OF_YEAR);
   int moth = calendar.get(Calendar.MONTH); //this is 0 based;
   

   and so on

Answer 3

I suggest to check all the relevant values of the calendar at the same time using a SimpleDateFormat() like so:

SimpleDateFormat f = new SimpleDateFormat ("yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm");
String s = f.format (calcDeparture(yourDate, yourTime));
assertEquals ("2007-08-01 14:40", s);

Now call your method with odd dates (like 31.12.2999, August 45th, February 29th 2001, etc) to see what you get and how you should handle errors.