Question

I have below Serializer for JodaTime handling:

public class JodaDateTimeJsonSerializer extends JsonSerializer<DateTime> {

    private static final String dateFormat = ("MM/dd/yyyy");

    @Override
    public void serialize(DateTime date, JsonGenerator gen, SerializerProvider provider)
            throws IOException, JsonProcessingException {

        String formattedDate = DateTimeFormat.forPattern(dateFormat).print(date);

        gen.writeString(formattedDate);
    }

}

Then, on each model objects, I do this:

@JsonSerialize(using=JodaDateTimeJsonSerializer.class )
public DateTime getEffectiveDate() {
    return effectiveDate;
}

With above settings, @ResponseBody and Jackson Mapper sure works. However, I don’t like the idea where I keep writing @JsonSerialize. What I need is a solution without the @JsonSerialize on model objects. Is it possible to write this configuration somewhere in spring xml as a one configuration?

Appreciate your help.

Answer 1

Although you can put an annotation for each date field, is better to do a global configuration for your object mapper. If you use jackson you can configure your spring as follow:

<bean id="jacksonObjectMapper" class="com.company.CustomObjectMapper" />

<bean id="jacksonSerializationConfig" class="org.codehaus.jackson.map.SerializationConfig"
    factory-bean="jacksonObjectMapper" factory-method="getSerializationConfig" >
</bean>

For CustomObjectMapper:

public class CustomObjectMapper extends ObjectMapper {

    public CustomObjectMapper() {
        super();
        configure(Feature.WRITE_DATES_AS_TIMESTAMPS, false);
        setDateFormat(new SimpleDateFormat("EEE MMM dd yyyy HH:mm:ss 'GMT'ZZZ (z)"));
    }
}

Of course, SimpleDateFormat can use any format you need.