How to get the smallest (earliest) possible Date value

Question

I am trying to get the smallest possible value for date (ie, the earliest date). If I were using Java, I would do something like this:

new Date(Long.MIN_VALUE)

source

I could do something like this, but that seems like a lot of extra work. I could also just hard code the value like this: datetime.newInstance(-99999999999L);, because I think that is the smallest Long value possible... But that is not the nicest thing.

Any better ideas?

Answer 1

I question the validity of what you're doing, since I've never seen this to be necessary, but since you asked, from the docs:

The earliest valid date is 1700-01-01T00:00:00Z GMT, or just after midnight on January 1, 1700. The latest valid date is 4000-12-31T00:00:00Z GMT, or just after midnight on December 31, 4000.

So therefore to construct the earliest possible date, you'd do something like

Date myDate = date.newinstance(1700, 1, 1);

(Untested but it should work. Also, probably irrelevant but your Java example is constructing a very late date, not a very early date.)