JPA TemporalType.Date giving wrong date

Question

I have a class that has a date field representing a \"valid from\" date for a piece of data. It is defined like this:

@Temporal( TemporalType.DATE )
private          


        

Answer 1

After much experimenting and searching I'm pretty sure I've found the cause of the problem. The date is held in a java.util.Date which comes with all the baggage of time and a timezone. It would seem that JPA is reading the date 18 Sep 2003 from the database and then populating the date like this: "Thu Sep 18 00:00:00 BST 2003" - notice the timezone has been set to BST probably because it wasn't explicitly set by the database. Anyway, it is necessary to format the output in the JSF page if you only want to see the date like this:

This, however, assumes that the timezone is whatever is currently in force on the machine. In my case the timezone is currently GMT (because it's winter) so when presented with the date "Thu Sep 18 00:00:00 BST 2003" it converts it to GMT by subtracting one hour leaving the display showing 17 Sep 2003.