Changelog

2025-12-26 - Date/Time Handling & Comment Pagination

Comment infinite scroll pagination failed: older comments weren't loading
Root cause: Backend used LocalDateTime (no timezone info), frontend's JavaScript Date interpreted it as local time, then converted to UTC when sending back - causing a 1-hour timezone shift

Migrated all date fields from LocalDateTime to Instant across all entities (Comment, ApplicationForm, Notification, User, ApplicationFormVersion)
Instant represents a point in time in UTC and is:
- Supported by JPA's @CreatedDate/@LastModifiedDate annotations (unlike OffsetDateTime)
- Serialized by Jackson as ISO-8601 with Z suffix (e.g., 2025-12-26T08:13:48.608921Z)
- Correctly parsed by JavaScript as UTC, ensuring round-trip consistency

Gitea pipeline seems not to be stable enough yet. Jobs don't get assigned runners consistently. Especially the backend job.
Switch to local nektos act runner also led to issues
- metadata-action not working properly: https://github.com/docker/metadata-action/issues/542
- Failing connection to gradle daemon during frontend job
Finally switched to simple shell scripts for CI/CD

New input field with title and text needed to be added to application forms
Adding new form elements to existing application forms caused type conflicts: frontend needed to add CreateFormElementDto (without ID) to arrays of FormElementDto (with ID)
Implemented separate endpoint for adding form elements: POST /application-forms/{applicationFormId}/sections/{sectionId}/form-elements