SimpleDateFormat sillyness

Ran into an amazingly dumb bug yesterday. I would say that this is clearly a bug in the behavior of SimpleDateFormat in Java. Why is it that when I give it a date that looks valid, and a format string that's not right, and in fact contains invalid numbers, it will go ahead and parse my date string producing a ridiculous result. But not so ridiculous it's obvious, or in fact, just throws an Exception, which for my money would be the desired outcome.

So this is the scenario. Parsing a date like this:

val dateStr = "2013-02-04 05:35:24.693 GMT"

with the date parsing string:

val dateFormat = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd HH:MM:ss.SSS z")

If you're paying very close attention, you will see the problem here; the month component is repeated. This yields the following date in the resulting Date object: "Tue Nov 03 21:00:24 PST 2015"

This result is clearly very different than what was sent in. I see two problems here. The date string contained two references to the same field. I can see where sometimes this might be useful, but honestly, I feel like you should have to set a flag or something for this to be silently ignored. In most cases having a reference to the same part of a date within a format string seems like a warning flag at least. The second problem is that the erroneous value for month that was give is beyond the scope of a calendar year. You can't have 35 months in a year. In my opinion this should have thrown an exception. I understand that potentially in some calendar system somewhere on this earth there maybe more than 35 'months' in a year or something, but this is very unexpected behavior, way outside of what I would considered normal.

In short, if you have a date string that is being parsed and coming out the other end with a very strange unexpected and wrong result, there's a good chance the format string is off, and probably only very slightly and in a way that's hard to spot without a very very careful eye.

On folding, reducing and mapping

I haven't updated in a while, but it's time to get back into doing this blog.

Today I want to do a brief little thing on folding, reducing and mapping. In the past, I've found myself doing things like this when building a SQL query:

val k = Map("name" -> "John", "address" -> "123 Main St", "city" -> "Los Angeles")

(k.foldLeft("")((a,b) => a + " and " + b._1 + " = ?")).drop(6)

Which on the face of it doesn't seem so bad, might have done something not that disimilar using a for loop in Java.  The thing about this is that it's actually kind of stupid.  There is a more idiomatic way to do this.  When you think about it, the initial operation is actually a matter of mapping the input list to a set of string, and then joining those strings with the and clause.  In Scala, the reduce operation essentially does what join does in the new Java, or other languages, but with any list.  When we think about it this way, we can therefore do this:

val k = Map("name" -> "John", "address" -> "123 Main St", "city" -> "Los Angeles")

k.map(x = > x._1 + " = ?").reduce(_+" and "+_)

or:

k.map(x = > x._1 + " = ?").mkString(" and ")

Ultimately ending up as something like:

val query: PreparedStatement = buildStatement(k.map(x = > x._1 + " = ?").mkString(" and "))
k.zipWithIndex.foreach(x => query.setObject(x._1, x._2))

Much cleaner, and more idiomatic.  Some might say this is obvious, but, it wasn't obvious to me immediately, and so I'm gonna guess it's not to others either!

Database Record Updates with Slick in Scala (and Play)

This is a simple operation that I found absolutely zero reference to in the documentation or the tutorials or the slides.  Eventually after digging through old mailing lists, I came across the solution:

        
(for { m <- MessageQ if m.id === oldMessage.id } yield(m))
  .mutate(r=>(r.row = newMessage))(session)

This is for a simple message class and a function that takes two arguments: oldMessage and newMessage.  The frustrating thing is that this is inconsistent with the simple formula for a single column update:

MessageQ.filter(_.id === 1234L).map(_.subject)
  .update("A new subject")(session)

When you try to apply this thinking to an update, you end up at a dead end.  The mutate operator is also used for deletion too:

MessageQ.filter(_.id === 1234L)
  .mutate(_.delete())(session)

Note that you can typically leave out the session argument as it's declared implicit within the appropriate scope. I'm also switching between syntax alternates because for some reason, either my IDE or the compiler gets grumpy when I try to use the filter() style rather than the list comprehension style in certain contexts. I still have to figure that out.

I'd like to write a longer post later at some point, but this at least covers the highlights.