Question

I know that struts2 can convert strings to Dates when populating the fields of my controller, however, it does so assuming the date string is in SHORT format. Is there a way to specify a different format for struts to use (for example, ‘yyyy-MM-dd’)?

Answer 1

You need to create your own CustomType converter which can change the given date to any format.
Something like

public class MyDateConvertor extends StrutsTypeConverter {
     public Object convertFromString(Map context, String[] values, Class 
toClass) {
         SimpleDateFormat sdf = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd");
          try {
              Date date = (Date) sdf.parse(values[0]);
              return new java.sql.Date(date.getTime()) ;
          } catch (ParseException e) {
              return values[0];
          }
      }

      public String convertToString(Map context, Object o) {
         SimpleDateFormat sdf = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd");
         return sdf.format(o);
      }
  }

You can get more details form Struts2 official documents and here are the details

Struts2 Custom Type Conversion