datetime - Changing timezone without changing time in Java

Question

I'm receiving a datetime from a SOAP webservice without timzone information. Hence, the Axis deserializer assumes UTC. However, the datetime really is in Sydney time. I've solved the problem by substracting the timezone offset:

Calendar trade_date = trade.getTradeDateTime();
TimeZone est_tz = TimeZone.getTimeZone("Australia/Sydney");
long millis = trade_date.getTimeInMillis() - est_tz.getRawOffset();
trade_date.setTimeZone( est_tz );
trade_date.setTimeInMillis( millis );

However, I'm not sure if this solution also takes daylight saving into account. I think it should, because all operations are on UTC time. Any experiences with manipulating time in Java? Better ideas on how to solve this problem?

Answer 1

I pity the fool who has to do dates in Java.

What you have done will almost certainly go wrong around the daylight savings transitions. The best way to to it is probably to create a new Calendar object, set the Timezone on it, and then set all of the fields individually, so year, month, day, hour, minute, second, getting the values from the Date object.

Edit:
To keep the everyone happy, you should probably do this:

Calendar utcTime = Calendar.getInstance(TimeZone.getTimeZone("UTC"));
Calendar sydneyTime = Calendar.getInstance(TimeZone.getTimeZone("Australia/Sydney");
utcTime.setTime(trade_date);
for (int i = 0; i < Calendar.FIELD_COUNT; i++) {
  sydneyTime.set(i, utcTime.get(i));
}

Then you won't be using any deprecated methods.