Realm-java: Between, greaterThan, lessThan... ISO date support

[atouchsimo]

Hi guys
Is there a possibility to support iso date on :)

• between()
• greaterThan()
• lessThan()
• greaterThanOrEqualTo()
• lessThanOrEqualTo()

[Zhuinden]

Why not store date as Date?

[atouchsimo]

The api already returns ISO String saving it as Date needs to for loop each item and convert each ISO String field value to Date

[cmelchior]

Hi @atouchsimo . Doing that conversion for each query would be so much more expensive than you doing the conversion when inserting data into Realm. Also it would slow down any query as we would have to check if the input string was a ISO date.

So this is not something we would want to do. The Date data type was meant for this type of thing after all.

Note you can just do the conversion in your model classes

public Foo extends RealmObject {
  private Date date;
  SimpleDateFormat inFormat = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ssZ"); // Needs to be thread-local. It is not thread safe.

  public void setDate(String date) {
    date = inFormat.parse(date);
  } 
}

[Zhuinden]

This really is why I tend to say, it's best to keep API objects and RealmObjects separate.

[nolanamy]

@cmelchior How about between/lessThan/greaterThan support for Strings?

[Zhuinden]

So what exactly would it mean to be between two strings?

[nolanamy]

Well... greaterThan one and lessThan the other, I suppose 😏

I'd like to use it to grab a series of alphabetically-sorted chunks from a collection. If we can sort on a type (like String), then we should be able to comparison-query on it too.