Is there an annotation-based way to register PropertyEditors globally in Spring MVC 3.0?

Question

I was wondering if there was a way of registering a PropertyEditor globally within Spring MVC 3.0 onwards. In the documentation their documentation they show how to use annotations to customise bean PropertyEditor on a per-controller basis, and -it seems to me- like an XML way of doing it globally. So I was wondering, is there a way, using just annotations to register PropertyEditors for all controllers without having to do a @InitBinder method for each one. Creating a common super-class with a @InitBinder method is not desirable either.

The other question on this subject was asked before Spring 3.0 was released.

Answer 1

package com.projectr.web;

import java.text.SimpleDateFormat;
import java.util.Date;

import org.springframework.beans.propertyeditors.CustomBooleanEditor;
import org.springframework.beans.propertyeditors.CustomDateEditor;
import org.springframework.beans.propertyeditors.CustomNumberEditor;
import org.springframework.web.bind.WebDataBinder;
import org.springframework.web.bind.support.WebBindingInitializer;
import org.springframework.web.context.request.WebRequest;
import org.springframework.web.multipart.support.ByteArrayMultipartFileEditor;

/**
 * Shared WebBindingInitializer for custom property editors.
 * 
 * @author aramirez
 * 
 */
public class CommonBindingInitializer implements WebBindingInitializer {
    public void initBinder(WebDataBinder binder, WebRequest request) {
        binder.registerCustomEditor(Integer.class, null, new CustomNumberEditor(Integer.class, null, true));
        binder.registerCustomEditor(Long.class, null, new CustomNumberEditor( Long.class, null, true));
        binder.registerCustomEditor(Boolean.class, null, new CustomBooleanEditor(true));
        binder.registerCustomEditor(byte[].class, new ByteArrayMultipartFileEditor());
        SimpleDateFormat dateFormat = new SimpleDateFormat("MM/dd/yyyy", request.getLocale());
        dateFormat.setLenient(false);
        binder.registerCustomEditor(Date.class, null, new CustomDateEditor(dateFormat, true));
    }
}

In your application-context or dispatcher-servlet

  <bean class="org.springframework.web.servlet.mvc.method.annotation.RequestMappingHandlerAdapter">
    <property name="webBindingInitializer">
      <bean class="com.projectr.web.CommonBindingInitializer"/>
    </property>
  </bean>

Annotation equivalent of the code above. Note that @ControllerAdvice is introduced in Spring 3.2.x

@ControllerAdvice
public class CommonBindingInitializer {
  @InitBinder
  public void registerCustomEditors(WebDataBinder binder, WebRequest request) {
    binder.registerCustomEditor(Integer.class, null, new CustomNumberEditor(Integer.class, null, true));
    binder.registerCustomEditor(Long.class, null, new CustomNumberEditor( Long.class, null, true));
    binder.registerCustomEditor(Boolean.class, null, new CustomBooleanEditor(true));
    binder.registerCustomEditor(byte[].class, new ByteArrayMultipartFileEditor());
    SimpleDateFormat dateFormat = new SimpleDateFormat("MM/dd/yyyy", request.getLocale());
    dateFormat.setLenient(false);
    binder.registerCustomEditor(Date.class, null, new CustomDateEditor(dateFormat, true));
  }
}