Handy Tools - A collection of useful small utils

In our experience while working with Sun IDM, we identified a few handy utilities that would prove quite useful. This section has been introduced to group such functions together. Feel free to use them and provide suggestions for more tools that can be included in this section.

While reading the xml-presentation of an object (eg: User, Configuration, TaskDefinition, etc.), it is often found that attributes such as createDate, lastModDate, etc. are represented in long-timestamp format (long integer value), which may be difficult to read at the first glance. It is similar to a unix-timestamp with the addition of milli-seconds into the value. This tool would let you convert it to a readable date.

Occassionally, strings may need to be tested based on a pattern (example: validating user input). This tool provides a quick and easy way to test a regular expression and returns a true/false response depending on whether the input-string matches the RegExp. It also shows a few hints in case the match fails.. just something to help you out with finding the cause.