Formatting the result of oql in VisualVM

Question

I have the following oql query running on visualvm against a heap dump and would like the creationTime field formatted as a date time field (its stored as Long).

select { id: s.id.toString(), createdAt: new Date(s.creationTime) }
from org.apache.catalina.session.StandardSession s

The above query lists the following output (snipped)

{
 id = 1010827848,
 createdAt = sun.org.mozilla.javascript.internal.NativeDate@66106135
}
...

So clearly its been "converted" into a Date but does not display it a human readable format. Doing a toString() on the date object just results in the field being displayed as Invalid Date.

1. Is it possible to format the the Long field as a Date field?
2. The id field's value also is off when queried using VisualVM. When I query the same heap dump using Eclipse Analyser I see the right value (which is BE27C51E8BF185A2FB3AA9164EC0C647). What could be happening to that?

Answer 1

1. The output shows that you are creating JavaScript Date object. The correct part of you OQL should be: createdAt: new java.util.Date(s.creationTime)
2. There is a known problem with a field, which is named id. See Retrieve "id" field values via VisualVM OQL query for more details. As a workaround you can use s["wrapped-object"].getValueOfField("id") instead of s.id.toString()

With above changes your query should be:

select { id: s["wrapped-object"].getValueOfField("id"),
createdAt: new java.util.Date(s.creationTime).toString() }
from org.apache.catalina.session.StandardSession s