Inserting a Groovy Date into a Time Stamp Column

Working with Dates in any language is one of those core fundamentals you need to know right away. Lucky for us, Groovy makes it super simple to work with dates. I am working on a project where I am using straight SQL to insert a record into a database using Groovy. It's pretty darn easy in most languages to grab the current date/time and in Java, you can do so just by creating a new instance of the Date class.

Date now = new Date();

The problem with this (and the same goes for other languages) is that you can't insert that value into a timestamp column. I need to stick this date/time into a timestamp column and to do so in most languages you need to format this so it matches up to what a timestamp column expects. With this simple Java example, we need to bring in another package to do formatting, create a formatting object with the correct pattern and then format our date. Not the hardest thing in the world to do but certainly something I don't care to do.

import java.text.SimpleDateFormat;

Date now = new Date()
SimpleDateFormat timestamp = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss");

// 2017-04-10 08:00:00
println timestamp.format(now)

Luckily I am using Groovy on this project. If you haven't already played around with Groovy it seems to remove the annoyances of Java by adding on to the API. Groovy adds a convenient method to all Date objects for converting a date to a timestamp. If you print out the class names you will also see that it's not just converting it into a formatted string but an actual timestamp object. No extra libraries needed and I don't have to remember what a timestamp format looks like.

def now = new Date()
def timestamp = now.toTimestamp()

println now // Mond Apr 10 08:00:00 EST 2017
println now.class.name // java.util.Date
println timestamp // 2017-04-10 08:00:00.00
println timestamp.class.name // java.sql.Timestamp

To me, this is just one in the land of many examples of how Groovy makes programming in Java fun.

_Question: What are some of the other ways Groovy makes your life easier? _

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