Illegal instant due to time zone offset transition

l Lenny

on September 21, 2015

Hi,

When I tried to perform SDTM validation for MH domain (medical history), below information popped out:

--------- System Information ---------

Version: 1.5

JRE: 1.8.0_25

OS: Windows Server 2008 R2 6.1 amd64

--------------------------------------

java.lang.RuntimeException: org.joda.time.IllegalInstantException: Cannot parse "1987-04-12": Illegal instant due to time zone offset transition (Asia/Shanghai)

at org.opencdisc.validator.engine.BlockValidator$BlockTask.call(BlockValidator.java:477)

at org.opencdisc.validator.engine.BlockValidator$BlockTask.call(BlockValidator.java:232)

at org.opencdisc.validator.engine.BlockValidator.validate(BlockValidator.java:214)

at org.opencdisc.validator.DefaultValidator.validate(DefaultValidator.java:440)

at org.opencdisc.validator.gui.ValidatorClient$ProcessMonitor.run(ValidatorClient.java:1418)

Caused by: org.joda.time.IllegalInstantException: Cannot parse "1987-04-12": Illegal instant due to time zone offset transition (Asia/Shanghai)

at org.joda.time.format.DateTimeParserBucket.computeMillis(DateTimeParserBucket.java:390)

at org.joda.time.format.DateTimeFormatter.parseDateTime(DateTimeFormatter.java:856)

at org.joda.time.DateTime.parse(DateTime.java:144)

at org.joda.time.DateTime.parse(DateTime.java:133)

at org.opencdisc.validator.rules.expressions.functions.DyCount.compute(DyCount.java:66)

at org.opencdisc.validator.rules.expressions.Comparison.evaluate(Comparison.java:178)

at org.opencdisc.validator.rules.expressions.Expression.evaluate(Expression.java:256)

at org.opencdisc.validator.rules.AbstractScriptableValidationRule.checkExpression(AbstractScriptableValidationRule.java:107)

at org.opencdisc.validator.rules.ConditionalValidationRule.performValidation(ConditionalValidationRule.java:58)

at org.opencdisc.validator.rules.AbstractValidationRule.validate(AbstractValidationRule.java:222)

at org.opencdisc.validator.engine.BlockValidator$BlockTask.call(BlockValidator.java:359)

... 4 more

We noticed that 1987-04-12 was the date when daylight saving time began.

May I ask how could I fix this problem without changing any data value?

Thanks in advance,

Lenny

Forums: Troubleshooting and Problems

j Jozef

on September 23, 2015

Illegal instant due to time zone offset transition

Writing (and testing) software that also works correct in other countries and timezones is often a challenge.
Here is an article explaining this error and how it can be corrected in the source code:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5451152/how-to-handle-jodatime-illegal-instant-due-to-time-zone-offset-transition

For the software developers: any action "format" or "parse" shouls always be in a try-catch construct, like in:

try {
... formatter.parseDataTime(...)
} catch (Exception e) {
// put some code here that e.g. writes a warning to a log file
// the "catch" prevenst the program from breaking down...
}