While parsing JSON response from webservices, I'm getting date field as '03/21/2012' in a string format. My JSON2Apex parser class is converting this value in String and I'm facing hard time converting this value in Date format.
Illegal assignment from String to Date
for(accountParser.cls_account caa : classlist){
Account A = New Account ();
A.Name = caa.Name;
A.Start_Date__C = caa.Start_date; // Error: Illegal assignment from String to Date
}
You can always convert the value again after you have parsed your JSON. Try using the Date.parse(...) method on the string.
A.Start_Date__C = Date.parse(caa.Start_date);
date.parse is that both an international DD/MM/YYYY and MM/DD/YYYY will look valid and be parsed by date.parse, but without any information to tell you which one you have. Without knowing where the date is from, its equally difficult to try to manually parse the date- unless you know that the format will always be the same, in which, it doesn't really matter. Regardless, fixing the json seems the best bet, which I considered out of scope of the question.
Commented
Oct 14, 2016 at 13:58
Technically, what you should do is fix the JSON from the source. Dates in JSON should always be ISO8601 format, to avoid ambiguity between DD/MM/YYYY and MM/DD/YYYY formats. If you can change the data so that your dates are always formatted as YYYY-MM-DD, you can then change Start_Date in your class so that it is a native Date object instead of a simple String. This reduces the odds of parsing errors.
