Mismatch between I18NSync and MessageFormat

There is the DevGuide https://developers.google.com/web-toolkit/doc/latest/DevGuideI18nMessages which defines GWT-Specific formats which even extend the standard java MessageFormat.

This works fine when the Java message class is written by hand and appropriate Java parameter types are specified as arguments to the message, but not when the I18NSync tool is used.

Example:

Message properties file:

  format.dateType={0,date,dd.MM.yyyy HH:mm}

Running I18NSync with parameter createMessages on it results in

  @DefaultMessage("{0,date,dd.MM.yyyy HH:mm}")

  @Key("format.dateType")

  String format_dateType(String arg0);

First question is: How could a string match to a date when this should be filtered via a message format?

Answer is shown by the GWT compiler:

  [java]  [ERROR] Only java.util.Date acceptable for date format

Only when the argument to format_dateType is manually corrected to java.util.Date, the compilation works which makes sense.

Still, why does the GWT compiler support message format but the tools do not? Am I overlooking something here?

From my point of view this is a bug. It would be sufficient to adopt the code in 

MessagesInterfaceCreator -> protected void genMethodArgs(String defaultValue)

so that it checks for message formats and writes the appropriate Java type instead of java.lang.String.

Is there any other quick workaround for this issue? In my case I cannot manually edit the Java message file as it contains hundreds of entries which are created, adopted and changed by others.

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