New 'date' provider

[serpro69]

Would probably be useful to have functions for generating different dates from within faker

[TZanke]

is there any known way to generate a date inside faker?

person.birthDate returns a LocalDate instead of Date.

[serpro69]

Hi @TZanke ,

I'm not sure I completely understand the question. If you're asking about this particular issue - it hasn't been worked on yet, so there's no way to generate "plain random dates" yet. But I would still prefer to return java.time classes from the faker.date.XXX functions.

The person.birthDate function that you mention returns a "random" date for a given person's age, so it's not entirely "random date", but more related to a person's information.

Also, are you referring to java.util.Date or some other "Date" class when you say "returns a LocalDate instead of Date."? And if it is java.util.Date, can you clarify why you'd want that? The only reason I can think of for wanting java.util.Date is if you're using java version < 1.8 and don't have the java.time APIs. If this is in fact what you need - please open a separate issue for supporting older java versions.

[TZanke]

Thank you for your reply. I am new to Kotlin / Java and was using the old time APIs till know. I wasn't aware of java.time. I now migrated the whole codebase to the new apis. Works like a charm. Thank you.

Faker provider i would love to have in future:

• LocalDate (will use person.birthDate as a temporary workaround)
• ZonedLocalDate

[serpro69]

It's possible and quite easy to convert from one java.time type to another, so I don't see much point in creating functions with all possible return types. Although I have been thinking that it could be better to return ZonedDateTime (or even Instant) instead of LocalDateTime and that's what I'll probably go for in the Date provider. But I don't think I'll do that for the person.birthDate unless someone complains about it :D

As for person.birthDate. As I mentioned, at least in my mind it has a very specific use case and should generally be used for generating personal data, along with other functions in the Person data provider.