Auditing should support Java 8 Date & Time types [DATACMNS-411]

Nick Williams opened DATACMNS-411 and commented

This may or may not be in the right project. I think it is, but it may need to be moved to Spring Data Commons.

Currently, fields annotated @CreatedDate and @LastModifiedDate can be Joda Time’s DateTime or (I think) java.util.Date, java.util.Calendar, or java.sql.Timestamp. If it doesn’t support these last three types, it should.

Auditing should also support the Java 8 Date & Time API. Fields modified with one of these two annotations should be able to be java.time.Instant, java.time.LocalDateTime, java.time.OffsetDateTime, and java.time.ZonedDateTime

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Affects: 1.7 M1 (Codd), 1.6.3 (Babbage SR2)

Issue Links:

• SPR-11259 Add Converter implementations that convert legacy Date instances into JDK 8 date/time types (“depends on”)

• DATAJPA-592 Auditing annotations not working when applied to methods

• DATACMNS-307 Remove JodaTime dependency

Referenced from: commits https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-data-commons/commit/51b128fac1c17c8327d6fdd8c7ef87b039ac6c60

[spyro2000]

I can’t believe that this is still not working in 2021… For everyone tired of all this, just create this configuration class:

(Kotlin)

@Configuration
@EnableJpaAuditing(dateTimeProviderRef = "dateTimeProvider")
class PersistenceConfig {
    @Bean 
    fun dateTimeProvider() = DateTimeProvider { Optional.of(OffsetDateTime.now()) }
}

[schauder]

Using LocalDateTime as the basis certainly was a mistake an we should probable fix that.

That said, discussing this on an issue that was closed 8 years ago isn’t helpful either.

For the record: The issue was closed because we do support Java 8 java.time classes to the extend that we actually want to: Anything with time zone is really out of place in my and not only in my opinion, especially since support for those in JPA and JDBC is … sketchy.

In order to get this ticket here it’s well earned rest:

• If you want us to change the implementation basis for Auditing time stamps from LocalDate to Instant please create a ticket for it. For that one a PR even without a ticket has also a good chance of acceptance.
• If you think you really need support for OffsetDateTime you are free to create a fresh ticket as well. Just be aware that you’ll probably have to do some convincing.