DateField formatting based on Locale is incorrect

[Jonatan Kronqvist]

For example setting the locale of a datefield to fi_FI with the date 13th of December, 2008 results in the following:

13.12.2008

The same date with the locale sv_FI (note: the same country, different language) results in:

2008-12-13

They should be identical, since the date locale should follow the country and not the language.

[Jonatan Kronqvist]

Apparently DateFormat and SimpleDateFormat format the dates according to the language and not the country... This doesn't seem logical to me, but perhaps I'm not aware of some rule.

[Jonatan Kronqvist]

The problem seems to be larger than this also. For example in Denmark (Danish locale da_DK) the format returned by DateFormat follows an ISO standard producing yyyy-MM-dd, which is not in normal use in Denmark. Danes use the format dd-MM-yyyy in normal every-day use.

http://bugs.sun.com/view_bug.do?bug_id=6427322

This means that the DateField cannot currently be used by Danish software developers to provide a natural-looking date. Which makes this pretty much a blocker for any localized dates.

The addition of a setDateFormat method to the DateField component should correct this problem completely, since developers can specify the format themselves.

[Matti Tahvonen]

in [5862].

Jonatan, please make a code review and test that the code works well enough for your real world problems. Only tested the new feature quickly in dev environment.

[Jonatan Kronqvist]

Works like a charm. Thank you!