How to enter a LocalDate value into BlueJ “Create Object” dialog box

Question

I\'m not trying to format the date in YYYY-MM-DD or dd/MM/YYYY. I\'m asking about the literal format of LocalDate.

I just started learning Java and I am using this IDE c

Answer 1

Include package

As discussed in the comments, the solution is to add the code that creates the LocaDate, but bluej needs the fully qualified class name with the package prefix “java.time.”:

java.time.LocalDate.of(2018, 5, 30)

Not sure why it doesn't work with just LocalDate.of(...) (even with the class correclty imported), but at least this works.

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Just another detail: a date has no format. Classes like LocalDate just holds values (in this case, it has year, month and day values), but a date itself has no format at all. The same date can be represented in many different formats: May 30th 2018, 2018-05-30, 30/05/18 are different formats, but all represent the same date. A date object just holds the values, and you can choose whatever format you want to represent it.

When you print a LocalDate, it implicity calls toString(), which by default chooses yyyy-MM-dd format, which is a ISO 8601 format, but as I said, that's just one of the many possible ways to format a date (although the value always stays the same). Telling that "a date has a format" is wrong and misleading.

Answer 2

Try converting the LocalDate in the call, such as:

TestPaper (2018-05-30, LocalDate.parse("2018/05/30"), 30/05/2018);

There are other static methods within LocalDate you can use. See here for more examples.

From your comment above, don't forget your import:

import java.time.LocalDate;