Sam Shrefler

Truth be told, the theater has been done for a couple months now, but I’ve finally gotten around to organizing my pictures (Google Picasa comes Highly recommended) and getting them uploaded (again Google Picasa Web Albums). I thought about trying to use Flickr, especially with all the Flex Mash-ups people have been doing with it, but Picasa was just too easy to pass up. Maybe they’ll release some APIs (or maybe they already have) that will help Picasa gain momentum since I love it for organizing my photos.

I’ve posted two different albums, one is a album with descriptions of the finished theater and the other is lots of Before & After pics (and some in progress) of the theater that can take you on a trip of our past two years.

So without further ado: My Picasa Web Albums

Background Information:
I’ve inherited an application that stores many Dates and Times. The software is used by people all over the world who manually enter Dates & Times from worksheets into the software. The information is stored in a SQL Database and all dates and times are stored without any Timezone information and represent all different timezones. Dates from different timezones aren’t compared or mixed, so when a report is generated form the database, its assumed the report and its dates and times are relevant to the client.

Many different applications hook into this system and I don’t have the luxury of changing anything other than my Flex application to make it match the rest of the system.

My Goal:
My Flex application should allow a user to enter a Date and Time, which I store into a Date Type. For example:
“11/16/2006 03:00:00 PM” would be entered by a user in Eastern Standard Time (GMT-5).
“11/16/2006 03:00:00 PM” would be entered by a user in Pacific Standard Time (GMT-8).
“11/16/2006 03:00:00 PM” would be entered by a user in Moscow (GMT+3).

Each of those Dates would be saved in my database as: “11/16/2006 03:00:00 ”

My Problem:
AMF3 no longer supports a Timezone Offset. See “AMF3 Specification” at OSFlash.org. I currently can take a Date & Time from my Database -> Backend (.NET in this case) > Gateway (Fluorine in this case) -> AMF3 and in reverse from AMF3 -> Gateway -> Backend -> Database without the Date or Time being modified in any way and without any Timezone information.

The problem is, Flex assumes the AMF3 information is in UTC(GMT). So as soon AMF3 is deserialzed into Flex, the Flex Date is modified to the client’s local timezone offset.

What I want is all three of the dates above to show up in Flex, regardless of the client timezone, as “11/16/2006 03:00:00 PM” and I don’t want to have to manually display the UTC Date all over my Flex application in order to do this. This would include if the Date is a member in a ValueObject.

My Solution (Work in Progress):
Everytime a Date is brought into Flex, I call a function:
[as]
public static function getUTCDate(myDate:Date):Date
{
return new Date(myDate.fullYearUTC, myDate.monthUTC, myDate.dateUTC, myDate.hoursUTC, myDate.minutesUTC, myDate.secondsUTC, myDate.millisecondsUTC);
}
[/as]
which is called as
[as]
flexDate = DateUtil.getUTCDate(flexDate);
[/as]

Everytime a Date is sent from Flex, I call a function:
[as]
public static function sendUTCDate(myDate:Date):Date
{
var sDate:Date = new Date(Date.UTC(myDate.fullYear, myDate.month, myDate.date, myDate.hours, myDate.minutes, myDate.seconds, myDate.milliseconds));
return sDate;
}
[/as]
which is called as
[as]
flexDate = DateUtil.sendUTCDate(flexDate);
[/as]

My Wish
Something that would make this automatic for me. Either a way to tell the AMF3 Date Deserialization to be saved as a Local Date, or some way to not make me call manually call these functions every time a Date is deserialized or serialized.

Many Thanks to Anyone with Any Ideas!

Due to an existing implementation of the application I’m working on and problems transferring Dates from Fluorine (.NET Remoting Gateway) to Flex, I decided to store and pass all my Dates as Strings. At first, this seemed like a reasonable and easy to implement change. As time has gone on, more and more problems seem to arise. I’m sure the best thing to do would be to find a way to use Date-typed Dates, but I’ve figured out and thought I’d share some workarounds/hacks in case anyone else is trying to/forced to use Strings as Dates.

1) Binding my dates to a DataGrid column:
In order to have my dates display in the form mm/dd/yyyy, I do the following:
Call a labelFunction named “dateLabel” which then calls a static function from my Util package “formatDateDisplay”
[xml]

[/xml]
[as]
private function dateLabel(item:Object, column:DataGridColumn):String
{
return Utils.formatDateDisplay(item[column.dataField]);
}
[/as]
[as]
//This is found in my Utils Package
public static function formatDateDisplay(date:String):String
{
// This removes any time data that is appened onto my Date String
return date.substr(0, date.search(’ ‘));
}
[/as]

2) My DataGrid Columns should be able to be sorted by Date rather than by String Comparison
Call a sortCompareFunction named “dateMyDatePropertyCompare” which then calls a static function from my Utils package “dateFromStringSortCompare”
[xml]

[/xml]
[as]
private function dateMyDatePropertyCompare(obj1:Object, obj2:Object):int
{
return Utils.dateFromStringSortCompare(obj1.myDateProperty, obj2.myDateProperty);
}
[/as]
[as]
public static function dateFromStringSortCompare(obj1:String, obj2:String):int
{
var date1:Date = (obj1 == ” || obj1 == null) ? null : new Date(obj1);
var date2:Date = (obj2 == ” || obj2 == null) ? null : new Date(obj2);

if (date1 < date2)
return -1;
else if (date1 > date2)
return 1;
else
return 0;
}
[/as]

3) Binding my String-Date to a DateField
You can not bind a String to a DateField selectedDate property, so it must be cast into a Date Type. The only way I’ve found to make this Bind is to do the following:
[xml]
selectedDate=”{(model.myDateProperty == null || model.myDateProperty == ”) ? null : new Date(model.myDateProperty)}”
[/xml]
and to save the DateField value to a String:
[as]
obj.myDateProperty= myDateField.selectedDate.toDateString();
[/as]

My hope is that one of the following happens from this post:

- Someone can save some time and use something I’ve written here
- I’ll learn a much cleaner way to do this and I’ll follow this up with a “I can’t believe i was doing that, now I’m doing this…post”

Comments are welcome and hoped for as always….