How to display a formatted DateTime in Spring MVC 3.0?

Question

I have a Joda-DateTime field in my model and want to display it formatted in a JSP view. I have annotated it with the new @DateTimeFormat annotation:

public class Customer {
   private DateTime dateOfBirth;

   @DateTimeFormat(style="M-")
   public DateTime getDateOfBirth() {
      return dateOfBirth;
   }
}

Now I want to display the dateOfBirth in my JSP:

Date of birth: ${customer.dateOfBirth}

But the result is unformatted:

Date of birth: 2010-08-11T11:23:30.148+02:00

After some research I found out, that I have to use the spring:bind-tag:

<spring:bind path="customer.dateOfBirth">
   Date of birth: ${status.value}
</spring:bind>

With this it works. But it seems too complicated for this simple task. And using this method on lists is even more complicated since you have to integrate the list-index into the binding-path.

So my question is: Is there a simpler way to display a formatted value using the spring formatting-annotations?

Answer 1

Use the spring:eval tag which understands the @DateTimeFormat rule:

<spring:eval expression="customer.dateOfBirth" />

Alternatively, you can remove the @DateTimeFormat rule from your model all-together and use Joda's formatDate tag as Naikus illustrates.

In a future release, Spring plans to support plugging in "SpEL", which is the "Spring Expression Language" invoked by spring:eval, as the default Unified EL implementation for your JSP pages. This would allow in-line expressions like ${customer.dateOfBirth} to be routed through SpEL as well. You can vote up this enhancement request here: https://jira.spring.io/browse/SPR-7459.

Answer 2

Because its a joda datetime object, and not a Date object, you will have to write your own formatting function or a custom tag.

If you can convert it to java.util.Date somehow, then you can use the built in jstl's fmt taglibrary.

<fmt:formatDate value="${customer.dateOfBirth}" type="both" 
      pattern="MM-dd-yyyy" />

But the latest jsp quickly allows you to create custom tags.