flex surprises again (this time with datefield)

In my "update" screen (in flex), I'm getting the actual date value from the model and showing it to the user. If the user changes this date value in the screen, no problem; it's working. But if he doesn't touch this date field then the value of it is null as far as I can see while debugging.

In my update screen this is the part I define the datefield.

< mx:DateField id="endingDateDatefield" text="{formatDate(myModel.endingDate)}" 
formatString="{FORMAT_STRING}" width="50%" height="25"/> 
                                  

Notice that formatDate() returns String.

The datefield is displayed correctly but when I try to save the new model I saw no value in debug. "parentPanel.endingDateDatefield.selectedDate" is null.
So I changed my code to:

< mx:DateField id="endingDateDatefield" selectedDate="{myModel.endingDate}" 
formatString="{FORMAT_STRING}" width="50%" height="25"/> 

Now I set the selectedDate field instead of text in DateField component which fixes the issue.

drop thread.sleep(), use timeunit's sleep()

Everybody has a Thread.sleep() call somewhere in his code.
sleep() method only accepts milliseconds and if you need some sleep functionality with another time granularity you have either to calculate the sum of milliseconds and put a magic number in the code

Thread.sleep(86400000L);

or a more readable way to do it

Thread.sleep(1000L * 60 * 60 * 24);

or a much more readable way;

TimeUnit.DAYS.sleep(1);

More beautiful code right?

queryparameterexception: could not locate named parameter

While testing my hibernate query I got a strange exception;
"nested exception is org.hibernate.QueryParameterException: could not locate named parameter".
I checked that the said parameter is in the hibernate model. Furthermore I checked there's a corresponding column in the database. So the problem was not about these. Later I saw that there's a problem while I was trying to set my named parameter. My hql query was like "from TableName t where t.field=:field1" and I was trying to set the value in "field1" with

query.setBoolean("field_", value);

As "field_" does not exist I got this error.
The correct form was;

query.setBoolean("field1", value);

comparing dates in flex

Let's see how we can compare dates in flex.

ObjectUtil.dateCompare(firstDate, secondDate);

This call above will return you -1 if secondDate is later than the first date, 1 if it's the contrary case and 0 if they match.

anti-patterns

I recommend Chris Kelly's anti-patterns article. A good read imo.