All, I'm a big fan of DateTool and use it all the time in my Velocity templates. I recently had a revelation that, when providing hints to my users like "please format your date like this: MM/dd/yyyy", the date format itself is being read from the user's preferences and always in the SimpleDateFormat form (that is, using English-appropriate letters, etc.).
SimpleDateFormat provides a simple way to localize a date format pattern
into a non-English locale: toLocalizedPattern
Basically, if you want to show MM/dd/yyyy in, say, German, you want to
say "MM/tt/uuuu". Or, in French, it should be "MM/jj/aaaa". (Forget that
MM/dd/yyyy is not exactly appropriate for my French and German friends,
it's the representation of the pattern I'm worried about).
Anyhow, it's not particularly convenient in a Velocity template to do
the equivalent of this:
new SimpleDateFormat(formatPattern, targetLocale).toLocalizedPattern()
So, I'm proposing adding a method to DateTool:
public String toLocalizedPattern(String dateFormat,
Locale targetLocale)
This method will pretty much just contain the above code.
Any thoughts? I can add the method myself using my committer ninja
skills (I'll bet you guys forgot about me, huh?) but I wanted to make
sure that:
1. There wasn't a better way to do this, possibly already in existence
2. Nobody minded me adding such a method
3. The addition wouldn't disrupt a 2.0 tools release
Thanks,
-chris
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