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Today, while working on a small piece of code I discovered something that appears to be a DateFormatter bug. I was using following DateFormatter:

private var formatter:DateFormatter = new DateFormatter();
...
 formatter.formatString = "MMMM";

to display just the month names. I didn’t really care about the year when constructing new Date so I thought I would pick 1970. It appears that for January 1970 the DateFormatter returns an empty string while for 1969, 1971 and any other dates it works fine. Here is the demo.

And the source code below.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<mx:Application xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml">

 <mx:Script>
  <![CDATA[
   import mx.formatters.DateFormatter;

   [Bindable] private var names:String = "";
   private var formatter:DateFormatter = new DateFormatter();

   private function listMonths(year:Number):void {
    // get just the month name:
    formatter.formatString = "MMMM";
    // create dates and get formatted values:
    var values:Array = [];
    for ( var i:Number=0; i<12; i++ ) {
     values.push( formatter.format( new Date(year, i, 1) ) );
    }
    names = values.join(String.fromCharCode(13));
   }

  ]]>
 </mx:Script>

 <mx:HBox>
  <mx:Button label="1969" click="listMonths(1969);" />
  <mx:Button label="1970" click="listMonths(1970);" />
  <mx:Button label="1971" click="listMonths(1971);" />
 </mx:HBox>

 <mx:TextArea width="300" height="200" text="{names}" />

</mx:Application>

It appears that the bug was logged quite a few times, just one of the tickets I’ve found: https://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/SDK-14528. It also appears that it won’t be fixed. According to the comments under the linked story DateFormatter class is not an Adobe code. Interesting…

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 18th, 2009 at 8:23 pm and is filed under Adobe Flex/AIR. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.