Pass value from the visualforce page to a global variable of a class

Question

I tried to pass the input field variable value(as provided by the user) to a global variable in the controller. I have the following code.

<div class="Modal">
    <apex:pageBlockSectionItem id="DateTimeofComment">
        <apex:outputLabel>Comment Sent Date</apex:outputLabel>
        <apex:inputfield id="CommentDate" value="{!AModel.dateTimeInput}" />
        <apex:commandButton action="{!AModel.save}" value="Save" id="saveCommentButton" />
    </apex:pageBlockSectionItem>

AModel is an extension class. In the AModel class I have the global variable

public DateTime dateTimeInput {get;set;}
public void save() {
    //Save Code.............
}

What is happening is that whenever I am trying to save the visualforce page code given above it is throwing the following error.

Error:

Could not resolve the entity from <apex:inputField> value binding {!AModel.dateTimeInput}. can only be used with SObjects, or objects that are Visualforce field component resolvable.

Can anyone tell me how this issue will be ressolved?

Answer 1

A good solution to this is to use a proxy object in the controller to capture the dateTime value

public Event evt { // proxy object, fld StartDateTime is creatable
  get {
    if (this.evt == null)
         this.evt = new Event();
    return this.evt; 
  set;
}  

... elsewhere in your controller (like in the custom save action method, you can use this.evt.startDateTime to reference the user-entered datetime.

Then your VF page is:

    <apex:pageBlockSectionItem id="DateTimeofComment">
        <apex:outputLabel>Comment Sent Date</apex:outputLabel>
        <apex:inputfield id="CommentDate" value="{!evt.startDateTime}" />
        <apex:commandButton action="{!save}" value="Save" id="saveCommentButton" />
    </apex:pageBlockSectionItem>

The advantage of this approach is you leverage the builtin SFDC datetime picker and you can avoid all the hassle of parsing datetimes.

Answer 2

The error which you are getting describe this:

If it's not an sObject field, you have to use one of the typed input tags. In your case, you would use <apex:inputText>.

Additional options include <apex:inputcheckbox> and <apex:inputTextArea> to handle other data types.