Reading Date fields

Generally speaking, when a Date field is created, you have to specify the format so PDI can recognize in the values the different components of the date. There are several formats that may be defined for a date, all of the combinations of letters that represent date or time components.

These format conventions are not PDI-specific but Java standard.

The following table shows the main letters used for specifying date formats:

As an example, the first field in our sales file, ORDERDATE, corresponds to a date. If we look at the first value, 2/20/2004, it's clear that we have the month, then the day, and then the four digits for the year, all separated by slashes. So our mask, in this case, should be defined as MM/dd/yyyy.

There are more combinations to define the format for a Date field. For a complete reference, check the Java API documentation, located at https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/api/java/text/SimpleDateFormat.html.