Compare Date objects with different levels of precision

There are libraries that help with this:

Apache commons-lang

If you have Apache commons-lang on your classpath, you can use DateUtils.truncate to truncate the dates to some field.

assertEquals(DateUtils.truncate(date1,Calendar.SECOND),
             DateUtils.truncate(date2,Calendar.SECOND));

There is a shorthand for this:

assertTrue(DateUtils.truncatedEquals(date1,date2,Calendar.SECOND));

Note that 12:00:00.001 and 11:59:00.999 would truncate to different values, so this might not be ideal. For that, there is round:

assertEquals(DateUtils.round(date1,Calendar.SECOND),
             DateUtils.round(date2,Calendar.SECOND));

AssertJ

Starting with version 3.7.0, AssertJ added an isCloseTo assertions, if you are using the Java 8 Date / Time API.

LocalTime _07_10 = LocalTime.of(7, 10);
LocalTime _07_42 = LocalTime.of(7, 42);
assertThat(_07_10).isCloseTo(_07_42, within(1, ChronoUnit.HOURS));
assertThat(_07_10).isCloseTo(_07_42, within(32, ChronoUnit.MINUTES));

It also works with legacy java Dates as well:

Date d1 = new Date();
Date d2 = new Date();
assertThat(d1).isCloseTo(d2, within(100, ChronoUnit.MILLIS).getValue());

Yet another workaround, I'd do it like this:

assertTrue("Dates aren't close enough to each other!", (date2.getTime() - date1.getTime()) < 1000);