Converting String to Date and Date to String in android

I struggled almost for an entire day trying to access and manipulate dates for my app. If I use date class, many of the methods show warning that they are deprecated. I took the help of simple date format and tried showing month and date. But some how the output was always wrong. 

So, if you need to access dates, set a date to current date or to any other particular date and also read dates from a edit text, you should ideally use 3 classes  viz Calendar, Date and SimpleDateFormat.

First create a Calendar object and initialize it with current date. 

     Calendar cal  = Calendar.getInstance();
  
Now to convert this to Date object use getTime() method.

     Date someDate = cal.getTime();//this returns a date object.

Now to get a string representation of this date use SimpleDateFormat class

            SimpleDateFormat dtFormat = new SimpleDateFormat("dd-MMMM-yyyy");
            String dtStr = dtFormat.format(someDate);

For today's date i.e. 22-7-2014, the string dtStr will be 22-July-2014.

Some points to note here 

1. In SimpleDateFormat , d - day, M - is month , y is year
2. For month don't use lower m. Use M instead. (That mistake caused me hours of struggle).
3. If month has 3 or more, it is shown in text, else in number .
1. MM - 07
2. MMM- Jul
3. MMMM-July

Convert string to date

For this use parse method of SimpleDateFormat 

        SimpleDateFormat formatter = new SimpleDateFormat("dd-MM-yyyy");
        try {
            Date dt = formatter.parse(datestr);
            mCal.setTime(dt);
        } catch (ParseException e) {

            e.printStackTrace();
           
        } 

Setting date or month or year

To set any of date, month, year or even hour, minute and second, you can use this method

        calendarObject.set(Calendar.fieldname,value);
  e.g.

mCal.set(Calendar.MONTH,5);
mCal.set(Calendar.DAY_OF_MONTH,4);