[threeten-dev] ISO8601 durations and java.time

[roger riggs]

Hi Klaus,

Can you remind me of the use cases?  Something like 2 years 3 months 1 
second
would seem like a work around for some other problem.
I would also be interested to know how the support in XML or PostgreSQL
for date and time periods is used in practice?

Roger



On 9/12/2013 6:21 AM, Klaus Malorny wrote:
>
>
> Hi,
>
> recently I took a first look on the new API that comes with Java 8 and 
> discovered something that puzzles me, namely, that there does not seem 
> to exist a class that can fully represent ISO8601 durations. 
> "Duration" does not understand months and years, while "Period" does 
> not understand hours, minutes and seconds/fractions. I have read 
> somewhere about a distinction between a "human" and a "machine" time 
> line, and for the latter, it may make sense for not having months and 
> years, but not for the other for not supporting durations below a day.
>
> I consider not having a class representing ISO8601 durations as 
> problematic, as these appear here and there in the real world, for 
> example in XML schemas* or in databases (e.g. PostgreSQL supports 
> something like). One would have to manage this as a pair of Duration 
> and Period, and would need to have a custom parser and string 
> conversion. But maybe I simply misunderstand the API. I looked into 
> the mailing list archive for the recent months, but I did not find any 
> discussion about it, so I just joined the mailing list to ask about.
>
> Regards,
>
> Klaus
>
>
> * I also cannot see any interaction of the new API with the 
> javax.xml.datatype.Duration class