Framework-level interface defining read-only access to a temporal object, such as a date, time, offset or some combination of these.
This is the base interface type for date, time and offset objects. It is implemented by those classes that can provide information as fields or queries.
Most date and time information can be represented as a number. These are modeled using TemporalField
with the number held using a long
to handle large values. Year, month and day-of-month are simple examples of fields, but they also include instant and offsets. See ChronoField
for the standard set of fields.
Two pieces of date/time information cannot be represented by numbers, the chronology and the time-zone. These can be accessed via queries using the static methods defined on TemporalQuery
.
A sub-interface, Temporal
, extends this definition to one that also supports adjustment and manipulation on more complete temporal objects.
This interface is a framework-level interface that should not be widely used in application code. Instead, applications should create and pass around instances of concrete types, such as LocalDate
. There are many reasons for this, part of which is that implementations of this interface may be in calendar systems other than ISO. See ChronoLocalDate
for a fuller discussion of the issues.