lucene dateToString, stringToDate

Question

Hi,

I am in a locale where the time is two hours ahead GMT+2. When I encode a date using new GregorianCalendar(y,m,d,d,h,m,s) and then use DateTools.dateToString with DAY resolution, I end up getting the day before.

Encoding 12:00 midnight 1,1,1970 I end up getting the 31st of january (22:00) which is clearly incorrect. The problem is even worse because stringToDate doesn't give me the same number back.

Apparently this monstrous confusion is by design.

What is the correct way to compensate for this so that a birth date can actually be searched correctly.

Thanks

Answer 1

Which constructor are you using to create the GregorianCalendar? If you don't specify the time zone, it will just use the default, which is the time zone of the machine you happen to be running the code on.

Make sure the Date object you pass into dateToString is normalized to GMT correctly. On the search side of things you'll need to normalize the date queries to GMT as well.

There is no way getting around normalization -- you don't know where you code is going to be executed, so you'll need to anchor your dates by normalizing to GMT