SDOs and xsd date

["Millies, Sebastian" <Se...@ids-scheer.com>]

Hello there,

I have an elementary question: when I define a date attribute like this:

<attribute name="validTo" type="date"></attribute>

and generate an SDO from it using XSD2JavaGenerator, the attribute
ends up String-valued. Is there a way to generate a java.util.Date or 
some such as the attribute type? 

If not, I guess DataHelperImpl.toDateTime(Calendar) should return a String
compatible with the XML Schema dateTime. But what about simple date?
And if I need to use some date and time api to manipulate the dates,
I'd need to know the exact format of the returned strings, including 
how time zones are represented. The spec seems a bit vague here.

-- Sebastian