How to initialize a Java Date object in Spring xml configuration file?

Question

Consider this simple example -

public class Person
 {
    private String name;
    private Date dateOfBirth;

    // getters and setters here...
 }

In order to initialize Person as a Spring bean, I can write the following.

<bean id = "Michael" class = "com.sampleDomainName.Person">
<property name = "name" value = "Michael" />
</bean>

But in the above bean definition, how can I set the dateOfBirth?

For eg. I want to set the dateOfBirth as

1998-05-07

Answer 1

Spring inject Date into bean property – CustomDateEditor

This paper give two suggestions:

1. Factory bean
2. CustomDateEditor

I suggest the "Factory Bean" because the CustomDateEditor is not supported in Spring 4.0+ and the Factory Bean is easy enough to use.

<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
    xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
    xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans
    http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-2.5.xsd">

    <bean id="dateFormat" class="java.text.SimpleDateFormat">
        <constructor-arg value="yyyy-MM-dd" />
    </bean>

    <bean id="customer" class="com.mkyong.common.Customer">
        <property name="date">
            <bean factory-bean="dateFormat" factory-method="parse">
                <constructor-arg value="2010-01-31" />
            </bean>
        </property>
    </bean>

</beans>