How to make Spring Joda-Time formatter work with nonstandard locales?

Question

I am developing a multilingual application using Spring 3.1 and Joda-Time.

Let's imagine I have a command object like this:

private class MyCommand {
    private LocalDate date;
}

When I request with UK or US locales it can parse correctly and bind date without any problems using corresponding dates format e.g. 21/10/2013 and 10/21/13 respectively. But if I have some locales like georgian new Locale("ka") it doesn't bind valid date 21.10.2014. So I need to hook into Spring formatters to be able to provide my own formats per locale. I have a bean which can resolve date format from the locale. Can you please point me into right direction how can I accomplish this?

Answer 1

You have to implement your own org.springframework.format.Formatter

Example

public class DateFormatter implements Formatter<Date> {

    public String print(Date property, Locale locale) {
        //your code here for display
        DateFormat df = DateFormat.getDateInstance(DateFormat.SHORT, LocaleContextHolder.getLocale());
        String out = df.format(date);
        return out;
    }

    public Date parse(String source, Locale locale)
        // your code here to parse the String
    }
}

In your spring config :

<bean id="conversionService" class="org.springframework.format.support.FormattingConversionServiceFactoryBean" >
    <property name="formatterRegistrars">
        <set>

        </set>
    </property>
    <property name="converters">
        <set>

        </set>
    </property>
    <property name="formatters">
        <set>
            <bean class="com.example.DateFormatter" />
        </set>
    </property>
</bean>

<mvc:annotation-driven conversion-service="conversionService"/>

Hope it helps you!