Sam Shrefler

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….