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SWT: The Newly Available DateTime Control

At 12:33 AM on Nov 6, 2006, R.J. Lorimer wrote:

Eclipse 3.3 M3 brings with it a new build of SWT, and with that a new widget: the org.eclipse.swt.widgets.DateTime control. Something missing from native SWT support until now has been a date/calendar picker; that is no longer the case. The DateTime class is a simple, natively supported widget for just that.

There are three formats readily available in the DateTime control: Date entry, Time entry, and a Calendar. Creating the three different formats is quite simple; here is how you create each:

DateTime calendar = new DateTime(parent, SWT.CALENDAR);
DateTime dateEntry = new DateTime(parent, SWT.DATE);
DateTime timeEntry = new DateTime(parent, SWT.TIME);

Date and time formats look fairly similar - the only real difference is the entry format that they support:

As for calendar, this is one of those widgets like a file chooser that can extol the virtues of SWT's native peer support. GTK has a native calendar date-picker that supports several layout formats; here is a comparison of the Gnome clock control (which uses the GTK calendar control) with my SWT calendar component (native GTK on the left, SWT on the right):

The comparison is of course fairly silly since SWT is not emulating the platform, but using it. Getting the user-input off of the date-time wiget is easy too. This widget has simple methods for retrieving the various input values using the java.util.Calendar API - in fact, DateTime uses Calendar.getInstance() internally to ensure it is locale-friendly. Here is some example code:

DateTime dt = new DateTime(parent, SWT.DATE); // or SWT.TIME if desired
int day = dt.getDay(); // Calendar.DAY_OF_MONTH
int hour = dt.getHours(); // Calendar.HOUR_OF_DAY
int min = dt.getMinutes(); // Calendar.MINUTE
int month = dt.getMonth(); // Calendar.MONTH
int second = dt.getSeconds(); // Calendar.SECOND
int year = dt.getYear(); // Calendar.YEAR

These ints relate directly to the constants on the java.util.Calendar class, such as Calendar.JANUARY for dt.getMonth() .

That's about it for now - keep in mind this is a young widget, and until Eclipse 3.3 releases (Q2 2007), it's still in a milestone status, and the API is not yet solid. Incidentally, while there is no promise, it looks like they have considered making it public API for the user to set the date format that is offered on the date/time API via a setFormat(String) method.

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