smartGWT - how to implement a date and time picker/chooser

SmartGWT is severly lacking a nice date/time picker/chooser. So for now, you need to use a work-around. The solution is to use the date picker in combination with a suitable method of selecting time. The standard TimeItem in smartGWT is particularly shoddy and user-unfriendly.

What you want is a spinner for the hours, a spinner for the seconds and a decent defaulting to today's date and time.

Well, fret no more, here is a solution. For the purposes of this example, we are implementing a send timestamp where the user selects a date and time to send an item. It gets placed on a dynamic form item so that it can be added to a layout.

Note that I set the borders here so that you can see the way that it's laid out. You will want to remove those lines in the real world.

  final DynamicForm scheduleForm = new DynamicForm();
  DateItem sendDate  = new DateItem();
   sendDate.setDisplayFormat(DateDisplayFormat.TOSERIALIZEABLEDATE);
  sendDate.setEnforceDate(true);
  sendDate.setRequired(true);
  sendDate.setInputFormat("YMD");
  sendDate.setTitle("Send at:");

  // This part sets up the spinners for choosing a time to send at
  // We need to default it to now
       
  Date rightNow= new Date();
  int hour= rightNow.getHours();
  int min=rightNow.getMinutes();

  SpinnerItem sendTimeHr = new SpinnerItem();
  sendTimeHr.setName("sendTimeHr");
  sendTimeHr.setMax(23);
  sendTimeHr.setMin(0);
  sendTimeHr.setTitle("Time:");
  sendTimeHr.setWidth(2);
  sendTimeHr.setDefaultValue(hour);

  SpinnerItem sendTimeMin = new SpinnerItem();
  sendTimeMin.setName("sendTimeMins");
  sendTimeMin.setMax(59);
  sendTimeMin.setMax(0);
  sendTimeMin.setTitle(" ");
  sendTimeMin.setDefaultValue(min);
       
  scheduleForm.setNumCols(6);
  scheduleForm.setWidth(414);
  scheduleForm.setBorder("2px solid black");
  scheduleForm.setCellBorder(1);
  scheduleForm.setFields(sendDate,sendTimeHr,sendTimeMin);