Vaadin 8 and DateField component

Vaadin 6 / 7 / 8
1

DateField component behaves not as expected.

The Value of the component, defined in api is
public T getValue()
.
Method
public String getParseErrorMessage()
 returns defaultParseErrorMessage, when the component is empty or user entered invalid text.
Because of a
TYPE SAFETY,
 i cannot decide whether the component`s getValue() is empty or user entered invalid string.

Method
protected Result handleUnparsableDateString(String dateString)
doesnt really help, because i want to validate datefield, when user clicks on a button, instead of loosing datefields focus, so i have set the errorHandler for component to null.

Can you implement something like
isEnteredTextEmpty ?

I`ve also tried
isEmpty
, but with no luck (returns true, when the text is still there).

Thanks.

2

As a workaround, colleague had an idea to get String data from DateField component via Java reflection.
For people, facing the same problem:

    public static String getStringDataFromDateField(DateField dateField) throws Exception {
        Field field = null;
        field = dateField.getClass().getSuperclass().getSuperclass().getDeclaredField("dateString");
        field.setAccessible(true);
        String dateString = (String) field.get(dateField);
        field.setAccessible(false);
        return dateString;
    }