How to save date and time in an orderly format Firebase & Android Studio

Question

I am creating a social app and I want to save the date and time of a post when someone uploads it. I want it to be saved for example as dd-MM-yyyy HH:mm:ss . Currently this is how it looks

So this is the code that I have in a method.

public static String getTimeDate(long timestamp){
    try{
        Date netDate = (new Date(timestamp));
        SimpleDateFormat sfd = new SimpleDateFormat("dd-MM-yyyy HH:mm:ss", Locale.getDefault());
        return sfd.format(netDate);
    } catch(Exception e) {
        return "date";
    }
}

I expect it to save the date and time that the post was uploaded in the format I want. But my problem is uploading it correctly in the Firebase DB. This is how I am uploading my current fields.

HashMap<String, Object> hashMap = new HashMap<>();
hashMap.put("postid", postid);
hashMap.put("postimage", myUrl);
hashMap.put("description", description.getText().toString());
hashMap.put("publisher", FirebaseAuth.getInstance().getCurrentUser().getUid());

I am trying to upload the timestamp like:

hashMap.put("date_time", getTimeDate() );

But when I hover over the parenthesis next to getTimeDate() it says Expected 1 arguments but found 0 so I'm guessing I have to use a string instead of the method name. Can someone help me on what to do?

Answer 1

To get current time when someone upload the data, you can from new Date() and change your method without having a parameter argument

public static String getTimeDate() { // without parameter argument
    try{
        Date netDate = new Date(); // current time from here
        SimpleDateFormat sfd = new SimpleDateFormat("dd-MM-yyyy HH:mm:ss", Locale.getDefault());
        return sfd.format(netDate);
    } catch(Exception e) {
        return "date";
    }
}