GregorianCalendar and SQLite

Question

I'm trying to setup a RPG that will keep track of a virtual time. After some reading GregorianCalendar seems to be the best way to do this but I have some questions and hoping someone with experience could give me some insight.

Here is what I'm trying to do. The game will start in the year 1675 and run for about 30 years. At that point the character will retire if they have survived that long. The character will be able to choose from actions I've preset for them through the coarse of the game. Some actions will be short and take a hour, others may take a week or a month. The real question comes from me using SQLite heavily. I want to save the current time as well as how long an action will take in my database. My first thought when setting this up was, if I want to start the game in Aug 15, 1675 to have my data base with 3 rows, set those fields to 8, 15, 1675. Then also have 2 more columns for the time. Pull these int via cursor and set them with something like

GregorianCalendar time = new GregorianCalendar();
time.set(year, month, date, hour, minute);

I figured I would pull how long an action takes in a similar fashion. Have an int X, and then a string to tell whether this time is in minutes, hours, days etc. Then either add this int to the int pulled from database to add to the calendar directly.

Q: If I add it directly to the calendar how would I pull int values from the calendar to store in database to load at a later time (when the player loads their game)?

Q: If I add it to the int stored in the database and set the calendar with this new int what will happen when I add enough to make the int out of scope for the calendar (Date is set to 31 but I add another day)?

Answer 1

You can convert from the GregorianCalendar object to/from UNIX time for example using getTimeInMillis() setTimeInMillis(). GregorianCalendar also has a roll() method:

Adds the specified amount to the specified field and wraps the value of the field when it goes beyond the maximum or minimum value for the current date. Other fields will be adjusted as required to maintain a consistent date.

Answer 2

I would recommend using Joda Time as a substitute for the (somewhat lacking) standard java date and time utilities. It's much more flexible.

It has functions to do date math, it supports several different calendars (ISO8601, Buddhist, Coptic, Ethiopic, Gregorian, GregorianJulian, Islamic, Julian), has support for intervals, durations and periods. It has built in formatters that let you make your output look like just about anything you wish.

If it were me, I would use Joda and store the date in the native format presented by Joda (I don;t remember what that is right offhand) and then pull it out again and use Joda to do all the date math, as well as having it convert it to whatever calendar you wish to use for display to the user.

Otherwise, it seems to me you'd be re-inventing the wheel.