How to convert an indexed date back to a Date in Jira 8

Question

I'm setting a due date on an issue, which is now stored as a numeric string. For instance, setting a due date to December 19, 2018 on an issue gives me "17884" when reading the DocumentConstants.ISSUE_DUEDATE field of that issue from the index. How do I convert that string/number back to a Date?

Ricardo Herrera · Answer

I found the answer here, @prunge says

"JIRA stores dates in Lucene as the number of seconds since the Epoch (1 January 1970) in Lucene long prefix-coded format." so you can either:

String lucenePrefixedCoded = document.get(DocumentConstants.ISSUE_CREATED);
long secondsSinceEpoch = NumericUtils.prefixCodedToLong(lucenePrefixedCoded);
Date created = new Date(secondsSinceEpoch * 1000);

or the shortcut:

Date created = LuceneUtils.stringToDate(document.get(DocumentConstants.ISSUE_CREATED));

Ricardo Herrera · Answer

Any help for doing this on Jira 7? I'm trying to read the "created" date but instead of getting a String I'm getting non-printable characters:

It seems like dates are stored as some kind of binary format. Do you know how can I convert this back to java.util.Date?

Seth Utecht · Answer

Hey @Marc-André Thibodeau,

Thanks for the clarification on the string values!

And I'm afraid there's not a utility in the Jira api for parsing a date or date+time without knowing the underlying use of the field.

Best,
Seth