[Feature Request] Please add support for java.time to com.amazon.ion.Timestamp

[cameronsstone]

Specifically, I would like to be able to get a java.time.Instant or java.time.OffsetDateTime out of an IonTimestamp. Based on #33, I suspect you'll want to add these to Timestamp instead of IonTimestamp, but either works for me. I also wonder if you could move towards making the Timestamp class internal in favor of OffsetDateTime as your primary mode for going to or from IonTimestamp.

[edit: corrected DateTime to ZonedDateTime - twice] [edit: changed ZonedDateTime to OffsetDateTime, as it's a better fit]

[raganhan]

Unfortunately ion-java is locked into being java 1.5 compatible for the foreseeable future so we can't add support for java.time at this time. When we are able to drop this requirement we'll revisit this and adopt java.time

In the meantime you need to manually convert the Timestamp into a java.time object, example:

int offset = -8
Timestamp timestamp = Timestamp.forMinute(2019, 11, 1, 12, 10, offset)
Instant instant = timestamp.dateValue().toInstant // Instant is in UTC
OffsetDateTime offsetDateTime = instant.atOffset(ZoneOffset.ofHours(offset))

[cameronsstone]

Thanks for a great answer! Sadly, I understand java's extended backwards compatibility approach.

What about an ion-java-lts fork of ion-java? :-)

[raganhan]

A fork is a way to get around this, but I suggest trying to add necessary extensions as an external package.

Using java.time as an example again you could have a util class or decorator to add the additional methods to Timestamp. The benefit of this approach is future interoperability with other packages that use ion-java such as ion-schema, jackson-dataformat-ion, etc.

[cameronsstone]

That's a good idea, though the natural endpoint of that approach is to make it a kotlin extension method, perhaps in an ion-kotlin package that wraps ion-java and adds functionality like this. :-)

Feel free to close this issue.

[raganhan]

I think it is worth to keep the issue open as we want to provide java.time apis when we can get rid of the jdk 1.5 requirement