A new contributor raised some good questions on a PR: https://github.com/apache/nifi/pull/7169
I rebased this branch as we discussed in the original PR, but I see that meantime NiFi code become much more dependent on DateFormat. I see many public methods in DataTypeUtils taking or returning DateFormat. I see some transition methods like DateTypeUtils.getDateTimeFormatter. It makes me feel that: - I don't see the wider picture of where you already use DateFormat now and how you planning to use it in the future - I don't know what is the plan to get rid of DateFormat because it looks like there is some - I don't know if you want to use a lenient, case insensitive format in all these places or some other one If you want to draw me a wider picture I can try to continue this change but otherwise, I don't want to introduce some ambiguous behaviour in date format handling so I'll close this PR. For NiFi 2.0, I think I would favor eliminating all pre-Java 8 Date/Time API code and making it a blocker for new PRs to introduce functionality that uses the old APIs. Thoughts? Mike