I'm parsing the times from AD. There are two formats, i.e., YMD LDAP timestamps for whenCreated, whenChanged, 18-digit LDAP/FILETIME timestamps for lastLogonTimestamp, pwdLastSet, etc. Because I need to analyze the data upon the time. It makes sense to get local time. Here are the two functions that I wrote to parse the two different formats. The calculation in the second function I referenced from Convert 18-digit LDAP Timestamps To Human Teadable Date Using Java
public static String parseLdapDate(String ldapDate) {
String[] parts = ldapDate.split("[.]");
String dateTimePart = parts[0]; //take the date string before .0Z
SimpleDateFormat sdf = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyyMMddhhmmss");
sdf.setTimeZone(TimeZone.getTimeZone("GMT")); //Z means UTC time, to the local timezone
SimpleDateFormat formatter = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss");
try {
Date tempDate = sdf.parse(dateTimePart); //parse the string to a date
return formatter.format(tempDate); //format it as what we want
} catch (ParseException ex) {
System.out.println("Parsing LDAP Date exception \n");
ex.printStackTrace();
}
return null;
}
public static String parseLdapTimestamp(String ldapTimestamp) {
long nanoseconds = Long.parseLong(ldapTimestamp); // 100 nanoseconds
long mills = (nanoseconds/10000000); // To seconds
long unix = (((1970-1601)*365)-3+Math.round((1970-1601)/4))*86400L;
long timeStamp = mills - unix;
Date date = new Date(timeStamp*1000L); // To milliseconds
SimpleDateFormat sdf = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss");
sdf.setTimeZone(TimeZone.getTimeZone("GMT"));
return sdf.format(date);
}
I have an example 20150520143936.0Z, which is converted to "2015-05-20 16:39:36". For the example 131097986571852097, it is converted to "2016-06-07 18:44:17", while http://www.epochconverter.com/ldap tells me that it's the GMT time and the local time is "2016-06-07 20:44:17". I will get the local time if I comment the code of setting timezone.
So now I'm confused, sdf.setTimeZone(TimeZone.getTimeZone("GMT"));
gives me local timezone or the universal time. I was thinking if AD stores whenCreated in the universal time, lastLogonTimestamp in local time. But in the functions I parse them as strings. There is no symbol about the timezone. If I comment this sentence in the second function, will I get local time for both attributes when I access an LDAP Directory in another place.
In the second case, you're constructing a Date
and then telling it to format that date in UTC - whereas in the first case, you're parsing it in UTC, but formatting it in local time. You're already assuming that the timestamp is stored as a number of ticks since the Unix epoch, which is a time zone neutral format.
If the aim is to produce a string representation in local time, then you should remove the sdf.setTimeZone
call. I would argue that a parse
method should be returning a Date
anyway though, rather than a String
. Or better yet, return a java.time.Instant
...
See more on this question at Stackoverflow