How to convert ZonedDateTime to Date?

Question

I am trying to set a server agnostic date time in my database and I believe the best practice to do so is to set a UTC DateTime. My db server is Cassandra and the db driver

Answer 1

Here is an example converting current system time to UTC. It involves formatting ZonedDateTime as a String and then the String object will be parsed into a date object using java.text DateFormat.

    ZonedDateTime zdt = ZonedDateTime.now(ZoneOffset.UTC);
    final DateTimeFormatter DATETIME_FORMATTER = DateTimeFormatter.ofPattern("yyyyMMdd HH:mm:ss");
    final DateFormat FORMATTER_YYYYMMDD_HH_MM_SS = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyyMMdd HH:mm:ss");
    String dateStr = zdt.format(DATETIME_FORMATTER);

    Date utcDate = null;
    try {
        utcDate = FORMATTER_YYYYMMDD_HH_MM_SS.parse(dateStr);
    }catch (ParseException ex){
        ex.printStackTrace();
    }